Prince of the North

by Turtledove, Harry

  Puffing a little, a plump eunuch priest climbed up out of the fissure in the earth that led down to the Sibyl’s chamber. Behind him came a grizzled Elabonian with a thoughtful expression on his face. With a nod to Gerin, he strode out of the temple and away to reclaim his team and vehicle.

  Kinifor said, “Nothing now prevents us from seeking the wisdom Biton imparts through his sacred Sibyl. If you will please to follow me, stepping carefully as you descend—”

  On his previous visit, Gerin had had to fight for his life against Trokmoi dissatisfied with what they heard from the oracle. He looked down to see if bloodstains still remained in the cracks between the tesserae of the mosaic floor. He saw none, which pleased him.

  Kinifor stepped into the cave mouth. Gerin followed. Darkness, illuminated only by torches not nearly close enough together, swallowed him. The air in the cave felt altogether different from the muggy heat he’d endured in the temple: it was damp but cool, with a constant breeze blowing in his face so that the atmosphere never turned stagnant.

  Kinifor’s shadow, his own, and Van’s swooped and fluttered in the torchlight like demented birds. Flickering shadows picked out bits of rock crystal—or possibly even gems—embedded in the stone of the cave walls. One glint came red as blood. “Was that a ruby we just passed?” Gerin asked.

  “It could be so,” Kinifor answered. “Biton has guided us to many treasures underground.”

  “Is it your god or your greed?” Van asked. Kinifor spluttered indignantly. The outlander laughed at the priest’s annoyance. Just then they came to a branch of the cave that had been sealed up with stout brickwork. “What about that? Didn’t you have to wall it up because your prying roused things that would better have been left asleep?”

  “Well, yes,” Kinifor admitted reluctantly, “but that was long ago, when we were first learning the ways of this cave. The bricks say as much, if you know how to read them.”

  Gerin did. Instead of being flat on all sides, the bricks bulged on top, as if they were so many hard-baked loaves of bread. That style had come out of Kizzuwatna in ancient days, not long after men first gathered together in cities and learned to read and write and work bronze. He took a long look at those bricks. They couldn’t possibly reach back so far in time … could they?

  After that first long look came a second one. Loaf-shaped bricks had not held their popularity long in Kizzuwatna: they required more mortar to bind them together than those of more ordinary shape. Some of the mortar on these, after Biton only knew how many centuries, had begun to crack and fall away from the bricks; little chips lay on the stone floor of the cave.

  The Fox pointed to them, frowning. “I don’t remember your wall there falling apart the last time I came this way.”

  “I hadn’t noticed that,” Kinifor confessed. “Some evening, when no suppliants seek the Sibyl’s advice, we shall have to send down a crew of masons to repair the ravages of time.” His laugh was smooth and liquid, like the low notes of a flute. “If the barrier has sufficed to hold at bay whatever lies beyond it lo these many years, surely a few days one way or the other are of scant import.”

  “But—” Gerin held his tongue. The eunuch priest was bound to be right. And yet—this wasn’t a slow accumulation of damage over many years. Unless he and Kinifor were both wrong, it had happened recently.

  The rift wound deeper into the earth. Kinifor led Gerin and Van past more spell-warded walls. Several times the Fox saw more loose mortar on the ground. He would have taken oath it had not been there when he’d last gone down to the Sibyl’s chamber, but forbore to speak of it again. Kinifor, plainly, did not intend to hear whatever he had to say.

  The priest raised a hand for those who accompanied him to halt. He peered into the chamber that opened up ahead, then nodded. “Gentles, you may proceed. Do you seek privacy for your question to the Sibyl?”

  Privacy would have cost Gerin an extra bribe. He shook his head. “No, you may hear it, and her answer, too. It’s no great secret.”

  “As you say.” Kinifor sounded sulky; most people who thought a question important enough to put to the Sibyl also thought it so important that no one other than Biton and his mouth on earth could be trusted with it. Gerin had been of that opinion on his latest visit. Now, though, he did not mind if the priest listened as he enquired about his son’s fate.

  Kinifor stepped aside to let the Fox and Van precede him into the Sibyl’s underground chamber. As before, Gerin marveled at the throne on which she sat. It threw back the torchlight with glistening, nacreous highlights, as if carved from a single black pearl. Yet contemplating the oyster that could have birthed such a pearl sent his imagination reeling.

  “It is a new Sibyl,” Van murmured, very low.

  Gerin nodded. Instead of the ancient, withered crone who’d occupied this chamber on all his previous journeys to Ikos, on the throne sat a pleasant-faced woman of perhaps twenty-five in a simple white linen dress that fastened over her left shoulder and reached halfway between her knees and ankles. She nodded politely, first to Kinifor, then to those who would question her.

  But when she spoke, she might have been the old Sibyl reborn. “Step forward, lads,” she said to Gerin and Van. Her voice was a musical contralto, but it held ancient authority. Though the Fox and the outlander were both older than she, they were not merely lads but babes when measured against the divine power she represented. Gerin obeyed her without hesitation.

  Coming to the crone on that seat had seemed natural to him. Finding a new, young Sibyl there made him think for the first time of the life she led. Biton’s mouth on earth was pledged to lifelong celibacy: indeed, pledged never even to touch a whole man. Here far below the ground she would stay, day upon day, the god taking possession of her again and again as she prophesied, her only company even when above the earth (he assumed—he hoped—she was allowed out of the chamber when no more suppliants came) eunuchs and perhaps serving women. Thus she would live out however many years she had.

  He shivered. It struck him more as divine punishment than reward.

  “What would you learn from my master Biton?” the Sibyl asked.

  Gerin had thought about how to ask that question all the way south from Fox Keep. If the god got an ambiguous query, the questioner was liable to get an ambiguous reply; indeed, Biton was famous for finding ambiguity even where the questioner thought none lurking. Taking a deep breath, the Fox asked, “Is my son alive and well, and, if he is, when and where shall we be reunited?”

  “That strikes me as being two questions,” Kinifor said disapprovingly.

  “Let the god judge,” Gerin answered, to which the priest gave a grudging nod.

  Biton evidently reckoned the question acceptable. The mantic fit came over the young Sibyl, harder than it had with the old. Her eyes rolled up in her head. She thrashed about on the throne, careless of her own modesty. And when she spoke, the voice that came from her throat was not her own, but the same powerful baritone her predecessor had used—Biton’s voice:

  “The Sibyl’s doom we speak of now

  (And worry less about the child):

  To flee Ikos, midst fearful row

  (Duren’s fate may well be mild).

  All ends, among which is the vow

  Pledged by an oracle defiled.”

  The god left his mouth on earth as abruptly as his spirit had filled her. She slumped against an arm of the throne in a dead faint.

  Kinifor said, “Gentles, the lord Biton has spoken. You must now leave this chamber, that the Sibyl may recover and ready herself for those who come here next.”

  “But the Sibyl—or Biton, if you’d rather—said next to nothing about the question I asked,” Gerin protested. “Most of that verse had more to do with you, by the sound of it, than with me.”

  “That is neither here nor there,” Kinifor said. “The god speaks as he will, not as any man expects. Who are you, mortal, to question his majesty and knowledge?”

  To that Gerin had n
o answer, only frustration that he had not learned more from the query over which he’d pondered so hard on the journey down from his keep. He took what coals of comfort he could: Biton had urged him not to worry. But what if that was because Duren was already dead, and so beyond worry? Would the god have mentioned him by name if he was dead, especially when Gerin had not named him? Who could say what a god would do? Where the Fox had done his best to prevent ambiguity, it had found him out. Dismayed, he turned to go.

  Van pointed to the Sibyl, who remained unconscious. “Should the lass not have come back to herself by now? You’d not bring new folk down here if they were to find her nearer dead than alive.”

  Kinifor opened his mouth, perhaps to say something reassuring. But before he did, he too took another look at the Sibyl. A frown crinkled the unnaturally smooth skin of his face. “This is—unusual,” he admitted. “She should be awake and, if a priest is here with her, asking what the god spoke through her lips.”

  Gerin started to take a step toward her, then remembered the conditions under which she served Biton: any touch from him, no matter how well-meaning, brought defilement with it. He wondered if that was what the last line of her prophecy meant, then stopped worrying about prophecy while she sprawled unconscious. He asked Kinifor, “Do you want to tend to her while we make our own way back up to the temple?”

  He might as well have suggested burning down the fane. “That cannot be!” the eunuch priest gasped. “For one thing, you might well lose your way, take a wrong turning, and never be seen again. For another, some turns lead to treasures not displayed above ground. No one not connected with the cult of Biton may turn his eyes upon them.”

  “I know what Biton does to those who would be thieves,” Gerin protested, but Kinifor shook his head so vehemently that his plump jowls wobbled.

  Van, as usual, spoke to the point: “Well, what about the wench, then?”

  Kinifor went over to her, put a hand in front of her nose and mouth to make sure she was breathing, felt for her pulse. When he straightened, his face held relief as well as worry. “I do not believe she will perish in the next moments. Let me guide you back to the surface of the earth, after which she shall, of course, be properly seen to.”

  “Honh!” Van said. “Seems to me you care more about Biton’s gold and gauds than about his Sibyl.”

  Kinifor answered that with an injured silence which suggested to Gerin that his friend had hit the target dead center. But this was the priest’s domain, not his, so he let Kinifor lead him out of the Sibyl’s chamber and back up the length of the cave to Biton’s temple. Still grumbling and looking back over his shoulder, Van reluctantly followed.

  To give Kinifor his due, he hurried along the stony way, pushing his corpulent frame till he panted like a dog after a long run. Surprisingly soon, light not from torches showed ahead, though the priest’s body almost obliterated it as he climbed out of the cave mouth. Gerin came right after him, blinking until his eyes grew used to daylight once more.

  “About time,” rasped the tough-looking fellow who waited impatiently for his turn at the oracle. “Take me down there, priest, and no more nonsense.”

  “I fear I cannot, sir,” Kinifor answered. “The Sibyl seems to have suffered an indisposition, and will not be able to reply to questioners at least for some little while.”

  That brought exclamations of dismay from the other eunuchs within earshot. They hurried to Kinifor to find out what had happened. He quickly explained. Two of Biton’s servitors hurried down into the cave mouth. “If she has not yet returned to herself, we shall bring her out,” one of them said as he disappeared.

  The Elabonian warrior whose question was delayed shouted, “This is an outrage!” When no one paid any attention to him, he shouted viler things than that. His face turned the color of maple leaves in fall.

  Gerin looked down his long, straight nose at the man. “Do you know what you remind me of, sirrah?” he said coldly. “You remind me of my four-year-old son when he pitches a fit because I tell him he can’t have any honied blueberries till after supper.”

  “Who in the five hells do you think you are, to take that tone with me?” the fellow demanded, setting his right hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “I’m Gerin the Fox, Prince of the North,” Gerin said, matching the gesture with his left hand. “You should be thankful I don’t know your name, or want to.”

  The red-faced man scowled but did not back down. Gerin wondered if he would have to fight in Biton’s shrine for the second time in two visits. The temple complex had guards, but most of them were outside the fane keeping an eye on the treasures displayed in the courtyard and on any visitors who, careless of Biton’s curse, might develop itchy fingers.

  Then, from the entrance to the shrine, someone called, “Any man who draws his blade on Gerin the Fox, especially with Van of the Strong Arm beside him, is a fool. Of course, you’ve been acting like a fool, fellow, so that may account for it.”

  The angry Elabonian whirled. “And what do you know about it, you interfering old polecat’s twat?” he snarled, apparently not caring how many enemies he made.

  The newcomer strode toward him. He was a tall, lean man of perhaps forty, with a forward-thrusting face, a proud beak of a nose, and dark, chilly eyes that put Gerin in mind of a hunting hawk’s. He said, “I’d be the fool if I didn’t make it my business to learn all I could of Gerin the Fox. I am Grand Duke Aragis, also called the Archer.”

  The angry color drained from the face of the impatient warrior as he realized he’d caught himself between the two strongest men in the northlands. With a last muttered curse, he stomped out of the temple, though he took care to step wide around Aragis.

  “Well met,” Gerin said. He and Aragis were rivals, but not open enemies.

  “Well met,” Aragis answered. He turned his intent gaze on the Fox. “I should have thought I might find you here. After word of your son, are you?”

  “Aye,” Gerin said stonily. “And you?”

  “On business of my own,” Aragis said.

  “Which is none of my business,” Gerin suggested. Aragis nodded—once; he was not a man given to excess. Gerin said, “Have it as you wish. Whatever your question is, you may not be able to put it to the Sibyl, any more than that big-mouthed ruffian was.”

  “Why not?” Aragis asked suspiciously. The idea that Gerin should know something he didn’t seemed to offend him.

  Before the Fox could answer, the two priests who had gone down to see how the Sibyl fared came back up into the temple. They carried her between them, her face white and her arms dangling limply toward the ground. “Does she live?” Gerin called to them in some alarm.

  “Good sir, she does,” one of the eunuchs answered. “But since her senses do not return to her, we’ll take her to her own dwelling” —he nodded his head to show in which direction from the shrine that lay— “and minister to her there. At the very least, she can rest more comfortably in her bed than in the underground chamber. Surely, though, the lord Biton will aid in her recovery.” That would have come out better had it sounded more like assertion and less like prayer.

  “Why should the lord Biton care?” Van asked, blunt as always. “Down below there, he sounded like he was getting out of the prophecy game.”

  “You rave, good sir, and tread the edge of blasphemy as well,” the priest answered. He looked for support to Kinifor, who had heard the Sibyl’s last prophecy.

  The eunuch who had accompanied Gerin and Van made a strange snuffling sound, almost one a horse would produce, as he blew air out through his lips. Slowly, he said, “The verses may lend themselves to the interpretation proposed. Other interpretations, however, must be more probable.”

  Even such a halfhearted admission was enough to shock the other two priests. Clucking to themselves, they carried the unconscious Sibyl away.

  Kinifor said, “I begin to fear there will be no further communing with the lord Biton this day. Perhaps everyone here wou
ld be well advised to return to his inn, there to await the Sibyl’s return to health. We shall send word directly that occurs, and shall seek no further fee for your inquiries.”

  “You’d better not.” Aragis put as much menace into three words as Gerin had ever heard. “And if the wench ups and dies, I expect my silver back.”

  The eunuch twisted his hand in a gesture to turn aside the evil omen. “The lord Biton would not summon two Sibyls to himself in such a short span of time,” he said, but his words, like the other priest’s, lacked confidence.

  People filed out of the shrine, muttering and grumbling to themselves. Kinifor went out to let those who waited in the courtyard know they would be disappointed in their hope for an oracular response. Their replies, like those in the temple, ranged from curious to furious.

  With rough humor, Aragis turned to Gerin. “What did you ask her, anyway, to put her in such a swivet? To marry you?”

  Gerin growled down deep in his throat and took a step toward the Archer. Unlike the fellow who’d started to move on him, though, he mastered himself. “I ought to just tell you it’s none of your cursed business,” he said, “but since you already know why I’m here, what’s the point? I asked after my son, as you’ve figured out for yourself.”

  “That’s a bad business,” Aragis answered. “The whoreson who did it may come to me, seeking advantage from it. By Dyaus, if he does, I’ll run up a cross for him, and you’ll have the boy back fast as horses can run. I swear it.”

  “If it happens so, I’ll be in your debt,” the Fox said. “I’d be lying if I told you the idea that you had something to do with it was never in my mind.”

  Aragis scowled. “Because we’re the two biggest, we circle round each other like a couple of angry dogs—I don’t trust you, either, as you know full well. But I did not have my hand in this, and I will not seek to profit from it, come what may. Would you, were it my lad?”