The Centurions

by The Centurions (retail) (epub)

  Fiorgyn came herself with it, hot thick stew and beer from the last year’s brewing. She settled herself like a cat in the rushes beside her husband’s chair, and watched Kari with relief while he ate. Of them all, she thought, it was Kari that Nyall feared most to lose.

  “That was good.” Kari put the bowl on the floor and one of Nyall’s hounds slunk forward to lick it. “I can’t remember when we’ve had a decent meal.”

  Nyall nodded, remembering their own nightmare trek from Jorunnshold. At least Kari had not had to watch women and babies die, he thought. But he had gone through something bad enough, Nyall knew. The harper’s thin face was flushed and the sunken dark eyes had an unnatural brightness.

  “What happened?”

  “We… saw the fire,” Kari said. “So we pulled around and rode back, but it was too late. Everything was burning.”

  “You didn’t attack—?”

  Kari shook his head. “No. There was… no point. It was lost already. And Gunnar and Runolf drew off as soon as they saw what had happened. They will be back in their holds by now,” he said, “no doubt telling the Roman-kind they had nothing to do with any of it. We… we crossed the river without being seen, and rode.” His face was bleak and Nyall knew that it must have cost him something to leave that burning hold behind.

  “The Romans were out hunting,” Kari went on. “We dodged them but we found… bodies. We buried what we found.” He broke off and ran a hand over his face. The flush was gone and he was pale now and sweating. “What is it?” Fiorgyn looked at him sharply.

  “Bad water,” Kari said. He shook his head as if to clear it. “The Romans fouled it, I think. I… should have known they would.”

  “You are ill,” Fiorgyn said. “I will get the priests.”

  “No. No… it is almost gone now. We had to ride on anyway, and some died of it, but we are mostly all right now.”

  “Are you sure?” Nyall said. “We have… something of a surplus of priests at the moment.”

  “Valgerd is here,” Fiorgyn explained. “He came in two days ago with his beard full of twigs like a woods hermit, and all he will say is that he had a vision and so came away before the Romans reached my father’s hold. I think it must have been a message sent by the priests’ drums. We are glad to have him – he is a very great man – but he and Asuin sit and glower at each other, and argue about signs in the sky and the proper time to gather herbs, until Morgian is afraid they will put a curse on each other.”

  “Then I shall do without their potions,” Kari said, “lest they kill me trying to outdo each other. I saw Geir as we came in. Who else rode with you?”

  Nyall gave him the total, and Kari grimaced as he came to Ingald’s name.

  “So the gods spared his thief’s hide and took your kin,” he said to Fiorgyn. “Lady, I am sorry.”

  Fiorgyn nodded her thanks. “Perhaps they saw more use for my father in Valhalla,” she said sadly.

  “Mord was with us,” Nyall went on, laying a hand on her shoulder. “But he died on the trail. Arni came in behind us. He must have tracked us like a hound – there were none of our men with him, only some of Jorunn’s and Mord’s.”

  Kari gave Nyall his own tally. Sigurd and his men had stuck with him, and so had Thrain, after some debate. It was likely that he would stay now that he knew Fiorgyn, who was kin to him, still lived. Nyall mentally recounted the survivors. Too few for a war band, and too many to feed. “We will have to split them up before snowfall,” he said. “The hold won’t support them all. I’ll try to sort them out after they have slept.”

  The sun was dropping and a thrall came in to light the fire in the stone hearth. Fiorgyn gave him the empty bowl to take away and told him to send blankets and bed-straw to the main hall.

  “We’ve been giving the warriors holdings left empty by our own dead,” Nyall said. “With luck they will marry the widows.”

  Kari nodded. There were too many widows. Best that they go to new husbands if they could. And best that the Black Forest warriors become Semnones, and so come under Nyall’s rule. There would be no way to judge their disputes otherwise, and make the judgment stick. And the chieftain who couldn’t keep order soon found a Council looking down his throat.

  Kari went away to the Companions’ chamber to sleep, and Morgian, having seen to the others, tapped on the doorpost and came in to sit by the fire with Nyall and Fiorgyn. She still mourned Lyting, Nyall knew, but he thought she had forgiven him for his death. Morgian had welcomed Fiorgyn, bereft of her own mother, with love. Fiorgyn returned it with a whole heart. She had loved her mother, but Gudrun, shrewd and practical by nature, had put so much of herself into holding her uncertain husband’s chieftainship for him, that there was little left over for tenderness. A soft bosom to weep on and a sweet, clear voice that could sing away her nightmares were new to Fiorgyn.

  Morgian looked concerned at what Kari had said about the bad water, and his refusal to have the priests pestering after him. “If he is still fevered in the morning, or any of them are, he will drink their potions and like it,” she said. “But Nyall, you must send Valgerd to another hold soon. Two high priests under one roof draw more attention from the gods than we really need.”

  “I’m going to send him with Arni,” Nyall said. “Mord and Jorunn’s men who rode with Arni have asked my permission to swear to him, so that will give him enough followers to take holding with, and Valgerd may put a little caution into his young brain.”

  Morgian picked up a stick and poked thoughtfully at the fire, making its glow ripple along the stones on the hearth front. “Ingald also needs… occupation.”

  “Ingald’s occupation has always been with the rumor that runs in the marketplace!” Fiorgyn said. “Let him out of your sight and he’ll make trouble!”

  Nyall looked at them both and thought a moment before saying: “He is of the chieftain’s Kindred of your tribe, Fiorgyn. If I let Arni and Ranvig take holding and keep Ingald here to dance attendance on me, he will have a right to make trouble. Mother, I want to give Lyting’s holding to Ranvig.” He waited to see her reaction.

  Morgian spread her hands in her lap and looked at them. “It is going to ruin now that it is masterless. Yes, better that Ranvig have it.”

  “There is another holding empty close by,” Nyall went on. “We will put Ingald there, and let Ranvig play watchdog.”

  “They will fight and steal each other’s cattle,” Morgian said.

  “But I will know what Ingald’s doing, won’t I? And I will have put no insult on him.”

  Morgian nodded, and Fiorgyn also, though reluctantly. Morgian understood why Nyall refused to fight with a man he had already bested in the matter of his wife and the command of the war band – it would seem a jealousy, as if he feared Ingald. Fiorgyn found that harder to understand.

  “That will give him a place in Council,” she said. Any lord with a holding of his own, and warriors and peasant folk under him, was entitled to a voting voice in the Council. Younger men who were still holdless, or warriors sworn to a lord, could also speak their mind, but the final vote rested with the landed lords.

  “He has a right to it,” Nyall said stubbornly.

  “Your own Semnone lords are calling for a Council already,” Morgian said. “There is some question over the rights of the newcomers.”

  “I feel like a nursemaid with a pack of children,” Nyall said. “What they mean is, they are worried about their own rights. Well, we’ll thrash it all out when Kari’s men have had time to rest.”

  * * *

  It was almost a month before Nyall could call his Council. The bad water had taken a greater toll than Kari admitted, and when Morgian went to look at him the next morning, she drew in a sharp breath and sent for Asuin and Valgerd both.

  The fever was back, and a wasting sickness of the stomach with it. After that one meal of stew and beer the night before, Kari could keep nothing more down. The two priests put their quarrels aside and worked together in a he
alers’ truce so amicably that Morgian said that if Kari lived, his sickness would have been worth it. But she was very much afraid that he wouldn’t, and it was plain that the priests were worried, too. There were others sick as well, but Kari was the worst.

  “I think that he got here on nothing but strength of will,” Asuin said, coming out of the Companions’ chamber with a barely touched bowl and the deerskin bag, embroidered with the healing signs, that held his herbs and potions. “There is nothing left but his will.” He gave his things to the boy who served him and pulled a chair to the hearth. The day was turning gray and there was a wet feel of rain in the air.

  “The others grow better,” Nyall said, then, almost pleading, “why not Kari?”

  “He is half-Roman, chieftain,” said the boy, an apprentice priest and full of his own knowledge. “It may be that the gods show their hand against him.”

  Nyall’s eyes flashed and Asuin cuffed the boy into silence. “Do not be thinking that you know the gods’ minds so well! If Kari’s half-blood has any bearing here it will be to his good. They are a strong people, the Roman-kind, not in size but in force of will. They hang on like fighting dogs. That is how Kari came back to us at all, lord,” he went on to Nyall. “He brought the others in on his will alone, I am thinking, and he has drained himself doing it. You know well that it takes more strength to command than to follow.”

  “Indeed it shows the gods’ favor that he is here at all,” Valgerd put in. “So perhaps the Lady Eir guards him still. Did she not lift the sickness from me, when it was time to go from Arngunnshold?”

  “Yours is the sickness of age,” Asuin said, the truce temporarily forgotten, “and an easier thing to lift than bad water in the stomach.” He was younger than Valgerd, his beard still a light brown clay color. Age equated with wisdom among the priest-kind, and Asuin combated Valgerd’s advantage in this by a show of earthly medical knowledge.

  Nyall left them arguing, while Morgian made soothing, peaceful noises, and he went to sit by Kari’s bed.

  They fought the chills and the burning fever that ran their alternating courses through Kari’s restless, shaking body for more than three weeks, while the others grew well. Nyall sat beside the bed until he was bleary-eyed, deaf to the priests’ urgings to leave. Fiorgyn finally persuaded him to get some sleep, promising that she would sit with Kari herself, or bring Morgian to do so, until Nyall came back.

  Nyall slept restlessly himself, amid bad dreams of Lyting in an open grave, and Kari’s dark, half-Roman face strangely overlaid with an iron Roman helmet, and the Roman centurion who spoke Semnones’ German suddenly sprouting a Semnone beard and mustache. And then they straightened themselves out again, and Kari’s face was familiar again behind his brown mustache – Kari never wore a beard, perhaps because Nyall did not – and the Roman had his helmet on again. Nyall awoke sweating, and with something vague about half-blood chasing its tail in the back of his mind. The Roman centurion was half-blood also, he thought. You took one blood or the other, he thought, and became that… but somewhere in the depth of things, the other blood still ran.

  He stood up, feeling in the rushes for the soft indoor boots that he had left by the bed – itself a pile of rushes and straw threaded through with sweet herbs and covered with soft, worked deerhides and a blanket of bearskin. He had fallen into bed without undressing. He rebraided his hair and pinned it up; outside the hall he took an icy splash in a beer vat of water. In his chamber, a thrall lit the fire and straightened out the rucked-up bed. He brought the chieftain clean clothes and scurried away with the dirty ones. There must be a washing today, Nyall thought. The women were making a lot of bustle in the great hall, and he could hear the splashing of the washtubs being filled outside with water from the rain vats that stood in the open court. It was morning, and it had been morning when Fiorgyn had made him go and sleep. He must have slept the day around. He shouted for a thrall to bring him food to the Companions’ chamber, and went to sit by Kari again.

  The Companions had risen already, and the chamber was empty except for Fiorgyn and the priests by the bedside and Kari’s still figure, cold and sweating now in damp bedclothes. When they had finished with their potions, the priests called in a thrall, who changed the bedclothes, and Nyall sat down again to his vigil.

  He sat, sometimes holding Kari’s hand in his when he grew restless, sometimes just watching the dark, sunken eyes and the chalky face, while the business of the hold went on all around, unnoticed.

  Morgian came once to tell him that the Council lords grew demanding, but Nyall just shook his head and never took his eyes from Kari’s. She shrugged and went about her work again. The fall rains would come heavily soon, and after them the snow, and Nyallshold made busy in preparation. The chambers were swept of their old rushes and fresh ones were laid down, and there was still the last of the autumn brewing to be done, and the stacked hay in the fields to be brought into the barns. Morgian, Fiorgyn, and their women, in rough gowns with aprons tied over them and their sleeves rolled up, worked in the hall and over the drying ovens in the smokehouse. The men rode after meat, returning at dusk with wild boar or a red deer carcass slung from the carrying poles.

  The meat was dried or smoked, and the hides would be scraped, stretched, and tanned; the bones and horns were saved for knife handles, combs, and other implements, and the entrails were thrown to the hound pack. Nothing would be wasted.

  The red coats of the cattle were already growing shaggy with the cold as they were driven in from the pastures, and the weaker ones, not worth feeding through the winter, were slaughtered. The horse herds were brought into the barns and the sheep into folds near the hold where the tribe could stand guard over the midwinter lambing.

  Every building in the hold was aired and scrubbed from rafters to floorboards, and the herbs and onions and garlic hanging to dry in the still-room gave off a pungent scent. The harvest tribute from each lord came in to the chieftain’s hold, and with it came such lords of the tribe as were not there already for the Harvest Feast that marked the ending of the year. A place had to be found for all, with their wives and thralls and dogs; and those who were feuding had to be kept well apart.

  Through it all, Kari slept or more often thrashed restlessly on the bed, sometimes singing to himself feverishly jumbled snatches of Hero Songs or songs of the battles of the gods. Once, he sat up and looked frantically for his harp and would not be quieted until Nyall put it in his hands. Occasionally Fiorgyn came away from her work, her pale braids wound into a crown on her head to be out of the way, to sit with Kari and make her husband sleep; but for the most part it was Nyall who kept watch, day after day, shaking off even Geir when that old councilor tried to reason with him.

  Finally, on the third day before Harvest Feast, with the hold crowded with quarrelsome guests and two blood feuds already sparked by sheer boredom, Kari opened his eyes and seemed to see not the dark things that prey on a fevered mind, but Nyall’s face above him in the firelight, almost as haggard as his own.

  “Have you been here… all this time?” he whispered, and Nyall nodded. Kari smiled and closed his eyes again, at last in quiet sleep, and Nyall got up and staggered to his bed to sleep also.

  He called Council for two days later, nearly a month after Kari had come in. Kari was also awake now, and Valgerd and Asuin had nodded their heads in agreement, saying that the sickness had passed. The Council would be on the day of Harvestnight – propitious enough if a chieftain wanted an excuse to cut a Council short once his orders had been given. Harvestnight marked the end of the old year, when the herds had been gathered in, and the tribe gave thanks for the stored harvest that would sustain it through the dead time to come. On Harvestnight, folk paid a wary homage to the dead of mankind, who might come to warm themselves at the feast fire on this one night when Hellgate stood open at the joining of the year. It was ill luck to talk of living matters on a night when the dead, or worse things that might come out of Hellgate, could hear and decide
to take a hand in them. For that reason, when the feast began at sundown, the Council must end.

  It was plain, when Nyall came out into the courtyard with Geir beside him, that he had waited too long to call the Council. Ranvig and Ingald were arguing with each other under the carved dragon’s head on the roof tree, and both glared at him out of sheer temper as he passed. Fiorgyn was talking in a low voice to Thrain, while Sigurd, who had renewed an old enmity with him over some long-gone cattle raid, was working off his temper in a boys’ game of ball in the field. Arni was perched happily enough on the stone wall of the well, mending a bridle strap, but the glowering looks being accorded him by two of the Semnone lords indicated that he too had found time to pick a quarrel. Valgerd and Asuin, their truce abandoned with their patient’s recovery, were standing over a terrified thrall with a rush basket of river herbs, debating whether or not he had cut them properly.

  Matters proved little better in the Council. Nyall strode in, his green tunic and trousers freshly cleaned and his flaming hair washed and neatly braided and pinned. Kari came beside him, his thin form wrapped in a blanket, to sit in Lyting’s old place. It was raining, and the cold and wet came in through the withy shutters and down the smoke hole to make the fire smoke and spit. Almost before their chieftain was seated, the Council lords were on their feet, each trying to yell above the others.

  Nyall sighed, gripped the oaken arms of the chair where he sat on piled deerhides, and began to sort through the complaints. He assigned empty holds to new masters from among the chieftains and Kindred of the newcomers, and although the Semnone lords spat like cats and shifted in their seats, it was finally, grudgingly, agreed that the Black Forest men must be taken into the tribe and this was the best way to do it. A man who had once been chieftain or chieftain’s kin in his own tribe must be a lord in his own right. Taking holding under another tribe’s chieftain was hard enough to swallow.