Prince of the North

by Turtledove, Harry

  “All right, Rihwin,” Gerin said. “You ride west to Schild’s border, and past it if his guards give you leave. If they don’t—” He paused for effect. “Tell them they, and their overlord, will have cause to regret it.”

  Rihwin nodded. “As you say.”

  “Now, Otes,” Gerin said.

  Again, Drago answered: “He said he was heading east along the Emperor’s Highway, to see if Hagop son of Hovan had tinker’s work for him. He didn’t think he’d sell Hagop much in the way of jewelry: ‘skinflint’ was the word he used, I think.”

  “For Hagop, it’s a good one,” Gerin said judiciously. “All right, you go after him, then.”

  “I’ll do that, lord,” Drago said, and strode out of the great hall. Gerin was as sure as if his eyes could follow that Drago was heading for the stables to hitch his team to his chariot, and that he’d ride out after Otes the minute the job was done. To Drago, the world was a simple place. His liege lord had given him an order, so he would follow it. Gerin sometimes wished he couldn’t see all the complications in the world around him, either.

  Van said, “You’ll want me to ride with you, eh, Captain? We’ll need a driver as well, if we’re to take on Diviciacus and his friends on even terms.”

  “You’re right on both counts,” Gerin said. He thought about adding another chariot and three-man team of warriors, too, but decided against it. Van was worth a couple of ordinary men in a fight, and the Fox did not denigrate his own skill with his hands. And Raffo Redblade, who’d been driving for them for years, hadn’t earned his ekename by running from fights. The Fox added, “And we’ll send Widin Simrin’s son south to ask what Aragis knows. Van, find him—he’ll be in the courtyard somewhere—and get him moving, too.”

  The decision made, Gerin took his armor down from the wall and put it on: bronze greaves first, then leather cuirass faced with scales of bronze, and last of all a plain pot of a helmet. None of it was polished; none of it looked the least bit fancy—the Fox left that to Van. But his own gear was sound. It did what he wanted it to do: it kept edged and pointed metal from splitting his flesh. As far as he was concerned, nothing else mattered.

  He slung his quiver over his shoulder, took down his bow, and then grabbed his shield. That was a yard-wide disk of leather and wood, with bronze edging to keep swordstrokes from chewing it up.

  Most Elabonian warriors had gear much like the Fox’s. Some men went in for gold or silver ornamentation, but he wanted nothing of the sort: curlicues and inlays could catch and hold a point, while rich armor made a man a special target on the battlefield.

  With his outlandish armor, Van of the Strong Arm was always a target on the battlefield, but no one yet had been able to strip his crested helm and two-piece corselet from him. Along with his spear, he carried a sword, a mace, and several daggers. He was also a fine archer, but did not use the bow in combat, affecting to despise slaying foes from afar as unmanly.

  “Foolishness,” Gerin said, as he had many times before. “As long as you’re alive and the other fellow isn’t, nothing else matters. You get no points for style, not in war you don’t.”

  Van brandished his spear. “Captain, that’s never been a problem.” His grin showed only a couple of broken teeth, more evidence (as if more were needed) he was more dangerous with weapons in hand than anyone he’d run up against.

  Practical as usual, Gerin went into the kitchens and filled a leather sack with twice-baked bread that would keep indefinitely (and that needed someone with good teeth to eat it) and strips of smoked mutton even tougher than the bread. If he had to fight from the chariot, the sack would go over the side. If he didn’t, he and Van and Raffo could travel for a few days without worrying about supplies.

  Gerin shouldered the bag and carried it out to the stables. Raffo, a gangling young man with pimples along the margin of his beard, looked up from hitching the horses to either side of the chariot shaft. “Be good to get out on the road, lord Gerin,” he said, getting the animals into the double yoke and securing them to the shaft with straps that ran around the front of their necks.

  “It would be better if we were going out for a different reason,” Gerin said heavily. Raffo’s face fell; he’d forgotten that. The Fox had given up on expecting tact from his men. They were, he sometimes thought with something approaching despair, only a couple of steps more civilized than the Trokmoi. Improving that was a matter for generations, not just years; even keeping them from falling back into barbarism often seemed none too easy.

  He stowed his shield on the brackets mounted on the inside of the car. It made the side wall higher. Van walked into the stables then. His place in the chariot was on the right side. He set his shield into its stowage place, too, and grunted approvingly when he saw the sack of supplies.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Now we’ll just need to buy a fowl from the peasants if we camp out in the open, or bleed out our prey if we go hunting: have to give the ghosts something, after all.”

  “Aye.” Gerin’s voice was abstracted. “The chase won’t be easy. Diviciacus and his friends have half a day’s start on us, and more than one road they can choose to go back to Adiatunnus—and we don’t even know they have my boy.” He wanted to scream in rage and fear. Instead, he grew more quiet and withdrawn than ever; he was not one to show worry on the outside.

  “Only one way to find out,” Van said.

  “True, true.” Gerin turned to Raffo. “Are you done harnessing the beasts?” By way of answer, the young driver vaulted into the car. The Fox clapped him on the back. “Good. Let’s travel.”

  The six-spoked wheels began to spin. The bronze tires on those wheels rattled and clattered as they bounced over pebbles. Gerin felt every tiny thing the wheels went over, too. Had he not needed the most speed he could get, and had he not thought he might have to fight to get Duren back, he would have taken a wagon instead. But the chariot it had to be.

  “A day of standing in this car and we’ll wobble on solid ground like sailors coming off a ship long at sea,” he said. The chariot rumbled out through the gateway, over the drawbridge, and away from Fox Keep.

  “Speak to me not of sailing,” said Van, who had done his share of it. “You’re not likely to get seasick in the car here, and that’s a fact—a fact you can thank the gods for, too. I’ve puked up my guts a time or three, and I’ve no wish to do it again.”

  “South and west,” Raffo said musingly. “Which road would they have taken, lord Gerin? Would they have fared south down the Elabon Way and then gone straight west toward Adiatunnus’ castle? Or do you think they went along the lesser roads that run straighter between here and there?”

  The Fox rubbed his chin as he considered. At last he said, “If they’re going down the Elabon Way, Widin will come on them, for he’s taking that road toward Aragis’ holding.”

  “He’d be one against three,” Van pointed out.

  Gerin grimaced. “I know. But he wouldn’t be foolish enough to attack them. If they have Duren, and he finds out about it, he’ll get word back to the keep. We can plan what to do next—go to war with Adiatunnus, I expect.”

  “I didn’t think you wanted to do that yet, lord Gerin,” Raffo said.

  “I don’t,” Gerin answered, “but I will. But if we go the same way Widin has, we narrow the search more than I want. I aim to throw my net as wide as I can, hoping to catch something in one strand of the mesh.”

  “Aye, makes sense to me,” Van said, which eased the Fox’s mind somewhat: his burly friend had a keen eye for tactics, though Gerin reckoned himself more adept in planning for years ahead.

  Raffo steered the team down a way that headed toward Adiatunnus’ lands. Within a couple of minutes, the clearing where Gerin’s serfs scratched their living from the soil disappeared behind the chariot. Forest closed in on either side of the road, which, but for the ruts from wagons and chariots, might have been a game track. Branches reached out and tried to slap the Fox in the face.

  H
e held up an arm to turn them aside. Whenever he went down a back road like this one, he was struck by how lightly civilization rested on the northlands. The stink of the castle midden, and the bigger one in the peasant village, were out of his nostrils now; the woods smelled green and growing, as if man with his stinks had never come this way. In the virgin pines and elms, robins sang sweetly, chickadees twittered, and jays cried their harsh, metallic calls. A red squirrel flirted its tail as it clambered up a tree trunk.

  But Gerin knew better than to idealize the forest, as some Sithonian poets (most of whom had never set foot outside the City of Elabon) were wont to do. Wolves ranged through the woods; in hungry winters they’d go after flocks or the herders who tended them. Longtooths would take men as they would any other prey, winter or summer. And the aurochs, the great wild ox of the forest, was nothing to take lightly—a few years before, Gerin had almost died under the horns and trampling hooves of a rogue bull.

  He motioned for Raffo to stop the chariot. With a puzzled look, the driver obeyed. But for the bird calls and the soft purling of a stream somewhere off out of sight, silence closed down like a cloak. To the Fox, who was comfortable with only himself for company, it felt pleasant and restful.

  Van, though, quickly started to fidget. He pulled a baked-clay flute from a pouch on his belt and began playing a tune whose notes ran in no pattern familiar to Elabonian music. “That’s better,” he said. “Too bloody quiet here.”

  Gerin swallowed a sigh and tapped Raffo on the shoulder. “Let’s get going again. I’d sooner listen to jingling harness than to Van’s tweedles.”

  “Aye, lord Gerin. Now that you mention it, so would I.” Raffo flicked the reins. The horses snorted resentfully—they’d started cropping the grass that grew between the ruts—and trotted down the road.

  At the next village, Gerin asked the serfs if they’d seen the chariot full of Trokmoi come past. They all shook their heads, as if they’d not only not seen such a thing but never heard of it, either.

  The Fox scowled. “We’re too far north or too far south, and Dyaus only knows which: that or they’ve gone down the Elabon Way as Raffo feared.” He pounded his fist on the chariot rail in frustration.

  “Too far north’d be my guess,” Van said. “The track we were on curved, I think, till it ran nearer west than southwest.”

  “I didn’t note that myself, but you’re most often right about such things,” Gerin said. “Raffo, the next road we come on that heads south, you take it till it crosses one leading in the direction we really want to go.” Or until it peters out, he thought: not all paths connected to others.

  The peasants watched as their overlord rode out of the village. Though still on land he ruled directly rather than through one of his vassal barons, he seldom came here save when collecting what was due him each fall. He wondered what the serfs thought of this unexpected appearance. Most likely, they were relieved he hadn’t demanded anything of them.

  Shadows lengthened as the chariot rattled and rumbled through woods that seemed to grow ever thicker. “I wonder if this road ever does join up with anything else,” Van said.

  “If it doesn’t pretty bloody soon, we’re going to have to turn back and head for that last village to buy a couple of chickens,” Gerin said. “I don’t want to have to count on just fire to keep the ghosts away.”

  Raffo pointed with his free hand. “Looks like more light up ahead, lord Gerin. Might be only a meadow, mind you, but it might be fields, too, and fields mean another village.”

  It was fields; Gerin felt like cheering. No sooner had the chariot emerged from the woods than the quitting horn called the peasants in from their labor. The Fox looked around. “Yes, I know this place—Pinabel Odd-Eyes is headman here. I’m used to coming here from the west, though, not out of the north.”

  Pinabel’s left eye was blue, his right brown. Brown and blue both widened when Gerin rolled into the center of the village. Pinabel bowed very low. “L-lord prince, what brings you here?” he stammered.

  The nervousness he showed made Gerin wonder what sort of cheating he was doing, but he’d have to worry about that later. “My son’s been kidnapped,” he announced baldly. Pinabel and the other serfs who heard exclaimed in dismay; family ties mattered to them, not least because those were almost all too many of them had. He went on, “I think three Trokmoi who visited Fox Keep yesterday may have taken him.”

  That brought more murmurs from the peasants. They were even more afraid of the Trokmoi than of night ghosts, and with reason: the ghosts could be propitiated, but the woodsrunners ravaged as they pleased. But when Gerin asked if Pinabel and the others in the village had seen the chariot Diviciacus and his comrades were riding, they all denied it.

  He believed them, much as he wished he thought they were lying. Pinabel said, “They might have gone through by way of the next road south. It’s very great, I hear, though I have never traveled far enough to see it.”

  “Maybe.” Gerin didn’t have the heart to tell the head-man that next road was just another muddy track. Like most serfs, Pinabel had never traveled more than a few hours’ walk from where he was born.

  “Will you stay with us till morning, lord prince?” Pinabel asked. “Night comes soon.” He gestured to the east, where Elleb, only a day before full, had already risen. Math hung halfway up the sky, while Nothos, almost at first quarter, showed near enough where south lay. And in the west, the sun was near the horizon. When it set, the ghosts would come out.

  But Gerin shook his head. “I want to push on as long as I may—every moment may prove precious. Sell me two chickens, if you would, so I can give the ghosts blood when they come.”

  “Aye, lord prince.” Pinabel hurried away. He returned a couple of minutes later with a pair of hens, their legs tied with strips of rawhide. Gerin gave him a quarter of a silverpiece for them: probably more than they were worth, but the smallest bit of money he had in the pouch at his belt. Pinabel Odd-Eyes bowed himself almost double.

  As the chariot bounced away, Raffo observed, “Most lords would have said, ‘Give me two chickens’ there.”

  That hadn’t occurred to Gerin. He said, “Those birds aren’t remotely part of the dues Pinabel’s village owes on its land. I have no right just to take them from him.”

  “Neither does any other Elabonian lord with his serfs, if I understand your ways aright,” Van said. “The thing of it is, most wouldn’t let that stop ’em.”

  “You’re probably right,” Gerin said with a sigh. “But the way I see it, I owe my peasants fair dealing, just as they do with me. If I don’t give it, how can I expect to get it in return?”

  “Often enough you won’t get it in return, no matter what sort of dealing you give,” Van said.

  “You’re right.” The Fox sighed again. “But when I don’t, I’m not soft on that, either.” Gerin was scrupulously fair. Anyone who thought him weak on that account soon regretted it.

  “If I don’t stop now, lord Gerin, we’ll not have time to make ready to meet the ghosts,” Raffo said, pointing to the western skyline. The sun, red as hot copper, had to be just on the point of setting.

  Gerin thought about pushing on for another furlong or two, but regretfully decided Raffo was right. At his nod, the driver reined in. Gerin jumped down and gouged out a trench in the soft dirt by the side of the road. That did the edge of his dagger no good, but it was the only digging tool he had. Van handed him the trussed fowls. He cut off their heads, one after the other—the knife was still sharp enough for that—and let their blood spill into the trench.

  None too soon: he still held the second hen over the hole when the ghosts came. They were, as ever, indistinct; the eye would not, could not, grasp their shape. They buzzed round the blood like carrion flies, soaking up vitality from it. Because he’d given them the gift, they were not fierce and angry and terrifying as they would have been otherwise, but tried to give him good advice in return.

  He could not understand them. He h
ad never been able to, save on the werenight, when his brother’s shade managed to deliver a message of truly oracular obscurity—though he’d been able to use it later to destroy Balamung just when the opposite result looked far more likely.

  Van bent over a firebow, twirling a stick with a rawhide lace to start a blaze for the evening. He shook his head like a man bedeviled by gnats. “I wish they’d quit yowling in my mind,” he grumbled, but then he grunted in satisfaction. “Here we go, Raffo—feed me tinder, a bit at a time. You know how.”

  “Aye.” Raffo had been crumbling dry leaves. He poked some into the hole where the stick from the firebow spun. Van breathed gently on the sparks he’d started, hoping to fan them rather than blowing them out. “You have it!” Raffo said, and gave him more tinder to feed the new little flames. With the fire well and truly started, he passed Van larger twigs to load on. Soon the thick chunk of branch on which the outlander had used the firebow would also catch.

  “I wish it were that easy all the time,” Van said. “Gut those birds, Fox, and pluck ’em, so we can get ourselves outside them. They’re better fare than what we brought with us.”

  “You’re right there.” The plucking job Gerin gave the hens was quick and decidedly imperfect. He didn’t care; he was hungry. He picked out the birds’ hearts, livers, and gizzards from the offal to roast them over the fire, then threw the rest of the guts into the trench with the blood.

  He, Raffo, and Van drew stems of grass for the night watches. Few bandits dared the ghosts to travel by night, but Gerin was not the sort to take unnecessary chances—the necessary ones were quite bad enough. And the beasts of the forest, being without souls themselves, took no notice of the night spirits. They usually did not attack travelers encamped in the woods, but you never could tell.

  Van drew the short stem, and chose the first watch. Gerin and Raffo drew again. This time Raffo won, and picked the watch that led to dawn. “Since I get to have my sleep broken up, I may as well take what I can get of it,” Gerin said, and wrapped himself in a blanket—as much to keep off the bugs as for warmth, for the night was mild.