Prince of the North

by Turtledove, Harry

  As the peasants withdrew, the argument got too low-voiced for Gerin to follow. The peasant who’d sold him the chicken was right; he and Van would have sold their lives dear. Even so, he was nothing but glad the farmers or robbers or whatever they reckoned themselves to be hadn’t found him and his comrade. No matter how dearly you sold your life, you could never buy it back.

  The Fox drew back down the path toward his camp. He didn’t think the locals would come out again, and he proved right. When Math had traveled a little more than halfway from the horizon to the meridian, he woke Van and told him what had passed.

  “Expected as much,” the outlander answered, setting his crimson-crested helm on his head and adjusting the cheekpieces. “They had that look to ’em, so they did. Not likely they’ll be back, not so late in the night.”

  “No.” Gerin got out of armor as Van donned it. “Wouldn’t do to count on that, though.”

  “Hardly.” Van’s rumbling chuckle had next to no breath behind it. “Tell you something else, Captain: on the way home, we make sure we roll through this place around noontime, so we’re none too close to it the night before or the night after.”

  “Can’t argue with you.” Gerin yawned enormously. “Haven’t the wit to argue with anything right now. I just want to sleep. If I get killed while you’re on watch, I’ll never forgive you.”

  “Nor have the chance, either,” Van said, chuckling again. Gerin crawled under the blanket, conceding him the last word.

  He awoke unmurdered the next morning to the savory smell of toasting sausage. Van had built the fire up from embers and was improvising breakfast. The flames sputtered and hissed as grease dripped down into them. Gerin accepted a sharp stick with a length of hard sausage impaled on it, burned the roof of his mouth when he tried to take a bite while it was still too hot to eat, swore, and then did manage to get the meat down.

  Van finished before he did, and harnessed the horses while he was getting into his cuirass and greaves. A jay perched on a branch of a spruce seedling screeched at the outlander all the while. He pointed at it. “You’d best be quiet—some lands I’ve been through, the folk reckon songbirds good eating.” As if it understood him, the jay shut up.

  “Elabonians eat songbirds now and again,” Gerin said. “We catch ’em with nets, usually, not with bow and arrow.”

  “Aye, that makes sense,” Van said. “They’re so small and swift, you’d need to be a dead shot to hit ’em, and you’d waste a slew of arrows.” He fastened a last strap. “Come along, Captain. Let’s be off.”

  The forest deepened and took on a new aspect as they rolled on toward Ikos. Perhaps, Gerin thought, taking on an old aspect was a better way of describing it. Elabonian traders and explorers, back in the days before Ros the Fierce brought the northlands under imperial control, described them as almost unbroken forest from the High Kirs to the Niffet and all the way west to the Orynian Ocean.

  Around the Sibyl’s shrine at Ikos, that ancient forest survived undisturbed. Some of the gnarled oaks and deep green pines might have been saplings when the men round what would become the City of Elabon were still unlettered barbarians. Some of them might have been saplings before the Kizzuwatnans in their river valleys scratched the world’s first letters onto clay tablets and set them in an oven to bake.

  Maybe the shaggy beards of moss hanging from many of those trees helped muffle sound, or maybe some lingering power clung to the forest: some of the trees that grew there, at any rate, Gerin had never seen outside these confines. Whatever the reason, the woods were eerily still. Even the squeak and rattle of the wagon’s ungreased axles seemed diminished. Far above the roadway, branches from either side interlaced, cutting off a good part of the daylight and turning the rest cool and green and shifting.

  “If we could drive the wagon under the sea, it might look like this,” Gerin said.

  “Maybe so.” Van kept craning his neck, looking up, down, all around. “I don’t like this place—and I don’t think it likes people, either. It wishes we weren’t here, and so do I.”

  “I’d argue with you, if only I thought you were wrong.” Gerin kept not quite hearing things pacing alongside the road as if tracking the wagon, not quite seeing them no matter how quickly he turned his head toward what he hadn’t quite heard.

  Van mused, “I wonder what would happen if, come a dry summer, some lord sent his peasants in here with axes and torches.”

  Gerin wondered if the forest and the things that dwelt in it understood Elabonian. He feared they did, for all at once the cover of branches over the road grew thicker and lower, while most of those branches suddenly seemed full of thorns. The very roadway narrowed, with trees—many of them full of thorns, too—crowding close, as if ready to reach out and seize the intruders. Once or twice he was sure he saw eyes staring balefully at him from behind the leaves, but he never got a glimpse of the creatures to which they were attached.

  Nervously, he said, “You were just joking there, weren’t you, my friend?”

  “What? Oh, aye.” Van was more than bold enough against any human foe, but how could even the boldest man fight a forest? Eyeing the growing number of encroaching branches, he went on, “All this lovely greenery? In truth, it would be a dreadful shame to peel even one leaf off its stem.”

  For a long moment, nothing happened. But just when Gerin was about to grab for his sword and start slashing away at the aroused trees and bushes, everything returned to the way it had been. The sun played through breaks in the overhead canopy, the road widened out again, and the trees went back to being just trees. Whatever had been moving along with the wagon went away, or at least became altogether silent.

  “Whew!” Van muttered under his breath. “Place must have decided I was just joking after all—which I was, of course.” He added that last in a much louder voice.

  “Of course you were,” Gerin agreed heartily. Then his voice fell: “All the same, we’ll spend tonight in one of the lodgings round Ikos, not in this wood. That will further prove we mean no harm to the powers here.”

  Van’s eyes met his. The two men shared one thought: It will also keep anything in the forest that’s still angry from coming down on us. The words hung unspoken in the air. Gerin didn’t want to give any of those possibly angry things ideas they didn’t have already.

  The sun was low in the west behind Gerin and Van when they topped a rise and looked down into the valley wherein nested Biton’s gleaming white marble shrine and, leading down from within it, the rift in the earth that led to the Sibyl’s chamber.

  “Last time we came this way, we camped in the woods,” Van said. “As you say, though, better to pay the scot at one of the inns down there tonight.” A little town had grown up in front of the Sibyl’s shrine, catering to those who came to it seeking oracular guidance.

  “Aye, you’re right.” Gerin sighed. He didn’t like silver going without good cause. Come to that, he wasn’t over-fond of paying silver even with good cause. But he did not want to spend a night in these uncanny woods; they were liable to shelter worse things than ghosts. He twitched the reins and urged the horses forward.

  When he’d visited Ikos before, the town in front of the shrine had been packed with Elabonians from both the northlands and south of the High Kirs, Sithonians, Kizzuwatnans, Trokmoi, Shanda nomads, and other folk as well. A big reason Gerin had preferred to camp in the woods then was that all the inns had bulged at the seams.

  Now, as the wagon rolled into town, he found the dirt streets all but empty. Several of the inns had closed; a couple of them, by their dilapidated look, had been empty for years. The innkeepers who survived all rushed from their establishments and fell on him and Van with glad cries. Gerin hardly needed to haggle with them; they bid against one another until he got his lodging, supper, and a promise of breakfast for half what he’d expected to pay.

  The taproom in the inn was all but deserted. Apart from Gerin and Van, only a couple of locals sat at the tables, drinking ale an
d telling stories they’d probably all heard a thousand times. The innkeeper brought ale and drinking jacks to his new guests. “And what would your pleasure for supper be?” he asked, bowing as low as if the Fox had been Hildor III, Emperor of Elabon.

  “Not chicken,” he and Van said, much as they had at Ricolf’s.

  “You’ve traveled some way, then, and spent nights in the open.” The innkeeper pursed his lips to show he sympathized. “I killed a young pig this afternoon. I was going to smoke and salt down the flesh, but I do some lovely chops flavored with basil and thyme and wild mushrooms. It’s a splendid dish, if I say so myself, and one I don’t have the chance to prepare as often as I’d like these days. True, the cooking of it takes a while, but where have you gentlemen to go in the meantime?”

  Gerin and Van looked at each other. They nodded. The Fox said, “Your trade has fallen off since the Trokmoi swarmed over the Niffet and the Empire shut the last passage up from the south.”

  “Good my sir, you have no idea.” The innkeeper rolled his eyes. “Sometimes I think all of us left here make our living by taking in one another’s washing. The shrine has fallen on hard times, that it has, and every one of us with it.”

  “Does the old Sibyl still live?” Gerin asked. “I’d not expected to find her breathing when I was last here five years ago. Now nothing would surprise me.”

  “No, Biton took her for his own last year,” the innkeeper answered. “The god speaks through a younger woman now. ’Tis not that the quality of oracle has suffered that’s cost us trade” —he made haste to reassure the Fox— “only that fewer folk now find their way hither.”

  “I understand.” Gerin drained his jack dry. The innkeeper hastened to refill it. Gerin drank again, sighed with something close to contentment. “Good to relax here, away from the ghosts, away from robbers in the night, with only the worries that brought me here to carry on my shoulders.”

  “That my humble establishment is able to ease your burdens does my heart good,” the innkeeper declared.

  “To say nothing of your coin hoard,” Gerin said dryly.

  The innkeeper turned his head to one side and coughed, as if mention of money embarrassed him. Then he paused, plainly listening over again to what Gerin had said a moment before. “Robbers in the night, good my sir? So men begin to hold the ghosts at bay and the gods in contempt?”

  “Men on the very road that leads here,” the Fox said, and told of the free peasants who’d looked to arm themselves at his and Van’s expense. “They didn’t come on us, for which Dyaus be praised—and Biton, too, for watching over us—but they weren’t out there in the darkness just for the journey. I heard them speak; I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Sometimes I think the whole world is guttering down toward darkness, like a candle on the last of its tallow,” the innkeeper said sadly. “Even my dreams these days are full of monsters and pallid things from the underground darkness. At night in my bed I see them spreading over the land, and poor feeble men powerless to do aught against them.”

  Gerin started to nod: here was another man who shared his gloomy view of the world. Then he gave the innkeeper a sharp look. “I too have had dreams like that,” he said.

  “And I,” Van put in. “I tell you the truth—I mislike the omen.”

  “Maybe the Sibyl will shed light on it.” Gerin did his best to sound hopeful, but feared his best was none too good.

  IV

  The horses were curried till their coats gleamed and hitched to the wagon waiting when Gerin went out to the stables to reclaim them. He tipped the groom who’d cared for them, saying, “You did more here than was required of you.”

  “Lord, you’re generous beyond my deserts,” the fellow answered, but Gerin noticed he did not decline the proffered coin.

  Every other time Gerin had visited the Sibyl’s shrine, the area around the fenced forecourt had been packed with wagons, chariots, and men afoot, and with all the visitors passionately eager to put their questions to Biton’s oracle as soon as possible. The only way to get in quickly—sometimes the only way to get in at all—was to pay off one of the god’s eunuch priests.

  The Fox had prepared himself for that eventuality. At his belt swung two medium-heavy pouches, one an offering for the temple, the other (though the word would not be used in public) a bribe for the priest who would conduct him to the shrine.

  He soon discovered he was going to save himself some money. When he and Van came to the gate in the marble outwall, only three or four parties waited ahead of them. Just a few more rolled up behind the wagon. Instead of shouting, cursing chaos, the oracle-seekers formed a single neat line.

  Van recognized what that meant, too. “Let’s see the priests try to squeeze anything past their due out of us today,” he said, laughing.

  To their credit, the priests did not try. They took the suppliants one group at a time, leading away their animals to be seen to while they consulted the Sibyl. Everything ran as smoothly as the turning spokes of a chariot wheel. Gerin wished all his visits had gone so well. He also wished this particular visit hadn’t been necessary.

  A plump, beardless fellow in a robe of glittering cloth of gold approached the wagon. Bowing to Gerin and Van, he said, “Gentles, you may call me Kinifor. I shall conduct you to the Sibyl and escort you from her chamber once the god has spoken through her.” His voice was pleasant, almost sweet, not a man’s voice but not a woman’s, either.

  Thinking of the mutilation eunuchs suffered, Gerin always felt edgy around them. Because the mutilation was not their fault, he always did his best to conceal those feelings. He swung a plump leather sack into Kinifor’s equally plump hand. “This is to help defray the cost of maintaining your holy shrine.”

  The eunuch priest hefted the bag, not only to gauge its weight but to listen for the sweet jingle of silver. “You are generous,” he said, and seemed well enough pleased even without any special payment straight to him; Gerin wondered if the temple would see all the money in the leather sack. The priest went on, “Descend, if you will, and accompany me to the temple.”

  As Gerin and Van got down from the wagon, another priest, this one in a plainer robe, came over and led the horses away. The travelers followed Kinifor through the gate and into the fenced-off temenos surrounding the shrine. The first thing the Fox saw was a naked corpse prominently displayed just inside the gateway; hideous lesions covered the body. Gerin jerked a thumb at it. “Another would-be temple robber?”

  “Just so.” Kinifor gave him a curious look. “Am I to infer from your lack of surprise that you have seen others Biton smote for their evil presumption?”

  “Another, anyhow,” Gerin answered. “With the chaos that’s fallen on the northlands since the last time I was here, though, I wondered if your god was up to the job of protecting the treasures here from everyone who’d like to get his hands on them.”

  “This is Biton’s precinct on earth,” Kinifor said in shocked tones. “If he is not potent here, where will his strength be made manifest?”

  Perhaps nowhere, Gerin thought. When the Elabonians conquered the northlands, they’d taken Biton into their own pantheon, styling him a son of Dyaus. But the Trokmoi brought their own gods with them, and seemed to care little for those already native to the land. If they prevailed, Biton might fail for lack of worshipers.

  Van cast an appraising eye on the treasures lavishly displayed in the courtyard before the temple: the statues of gold and ivory, others of marble painted into the semblance of life or of greening bronze, the cauldrons and mixing bowls set on golden tripods, the piled ingots that reflected the sun’s rays in buttery brilliance.

  The outlander whistled softly. “I wondered if I misremembered from last time I was here, but no: there’s a great pile of stuff about for your god to watch over, priest.”

  “The farseeing one has protected it well thus far.” One of Kinifor’s hands shaped a gesture of blessing. “Long may he continue to do so.”

 
The white marble temple that housed the entrance to the Sibyl’s cave was in a mixed Sithonian-Elabonian style, a gift of Oren the Builder to win the favor of Biton’s priesthood—and the god himself—not long after the northlands came under Elabonian sway. The splendid fane, elegantly plain outside and richly decorated within, was surely magnificent enough to have succeeded in its purpose.

  Seemingly out of place within all that gleaming stone, polished wood, and precious metal was the cult image of Biton, which stood close by the fissure in the earth that led down to the cavern wherein the Sibyl prophesied. The temple was a monument to Elabonian civilization at its best, to everything Gerin labored to preserve in the northlands. The cult image was … something else.

  As he had the last time he visited the shrine, the Fox tried to imagine how old the square column of black basalt was. As he had then, he failed. This was no realistic image of the god, carved with loving care by a Sithonian master sculptor or some Elabonian artist who had studied for years in Kortys. The only suggestions of features the column bore were crudely carved eyes and a jutting phallus. Yet somehow, perhaps because of the aura of immeasurable antiquity that clung to it, the cult image carried as much impact as any polished product of the stonecutter’s art.

  “Seat yourselves, gentles,” Kinifor said, waving to the rows of pews in front of the basalt column, “and pray that the lord Biton’s sight reaches to the heart of your troubles, whatever they may be.”

  The eunuch sat beside Gerin, bowed his head, and murmured supplications to his god. The Fox also prayed, though unsure how much attention Biton paid to petitioners’ requests. Some gods, like Mavrix, seemed to listen to every whisper addressed to them, even if they did not always grant requests. Others, such as Dyaus the father of all, were more distant. He didn’t know where in that range Biton fell, but took no chances, either.

  As soon as he finished his prayer, he glanced up at the cult image. Just for a moment, he thought he saw brown eyes staring back at him in place of the almost unrecognizable scratches on the basalt. He shivered a little; he’d had that same odd impression on his last visit to the shrine. Biton’s power might not reach far, but it was strong here at its heart.