Prince of the North

by Turtledove, Harry

  “I saw as much,” Selatre said. “Otherwise I’d not have waited to speak until the villagers could not hear. But that’s a callous way to have to look at the world.”

  “Lady, the world’s a hard place,” Van said. “Begging your pardon, but I’m thinking you’ve not seen a whole lot of it. Well, now you will, and much of what you see, I fear, will leave you less than joyful.”

  Selatre didn’t answer. Gerin couldn’t tell whether that was because she disagreed with Van but was too polite to say so or because she agreed but didn’t care to admit it. His opinion of her good sense had risen a notch, though, for the way she’d held her tongue where speaking out would have embarrassed him.

  They returned to the Elabon Way that afternoon. Selatre exclaimed in pleasure at seeing Biton’s mark on the stone that marked the side road. Then, remembering what had happened back at Ikos, she sobered once more. Gerin said, “I’m sorry the stone reminded you of the temple, but I must say you’re taking it bravely.”

  “In part, I suppose, what happened back there still seems unreal, not least because I wasn’t awake to see and feel it myself,” she answered. “And I lived most of my life in a village not much different from the one we went through. I know life can be hard.”

  Van urged the horses onto the stone slabs of the Elabon Way. The drum of their hoofbeats, so different from the muffled clopping they’d made on the dirt side road, caught Selatre’s notice. She exclaimed in wonder: “Here’s a marvel! Who would have thought you could cover over a roadway and use it the whole year around? No mud here.”

  “That’s why they made it so,” Gerin agreed. “You catch on fast.”

  “The work it must have taken,” Selatre said. “How far does it run?”

  “From the Kirs up to the Niffet,” the Fox said. “In the old days, they could command and have folk heed.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth, remembering the troubles he had keeping the stretch of the Elabon Way under his control even partly and poorly repaired.

  Van said, “Seems to me, Captain, every time we come north toward your holding, we’re in the midst of trouble. Last time, we were heading into the teeth of the Trokmoi, and now we’re stormcrows ahead of those—things—coming out of Ikos.”

  “We’d better stay ahead of them, too,” Gerin said. “Otherwise we won’t make it back to Fox Keep.” He pointed to the horses. “We have to get the best we can from them without making them break down. Getting stuck somewhere could prove downright embarrassing.”

  “That’s one word for it,” Van said, “and a politer one than I’d choose, too.”

  Gerin had hoped to reach some lordlet’s castle by nightfall; all at once, the idea of sleeping behind walls too high to be easily climbed developed a new and urgent appeal. But the approach of sunset found the wagon on the road with no keep in sight, only a peasant village. The Fox glumly bought a chicken and pushed the horses forward until the first stirrings of the ghosts reluctantly made him stop.

  “No sooner than we start out tomorrow, we’ll ride past three keeps,” he grumbled as Van spun his firebow. The outlander made fire with his usual skill; Gerin killed the fowl, drained its blood as an offering, then gutted it and did a hasty job of plucking before he cut it in pieces for cooking.

  “That’s the way of things, Captain, so it is,” Van agreed. He turned to Selatre. “Ah, thank you, lady—is that wild basil you’ve found?”

  “Yes.” She set the herb on the ground so he could pick it up and rub the chicken with it before he put the meat over the flames.

  Gerin drew first watch. Selatre curled up in his blanket and tonight fell asleep almost at once. When she began to snore (something Van had mentioned, but not a noise the Fox had thought to associate with someone a god sometimes possessed), the outlander sat up. Gerin jerked in alarm. “I thought you were gone, too,” he said reproachfully.

  “I nearly was, before I thought of something that woke me right up again,” Van said. “Mind you, Fox, I’m not saying a word against aught you’ve done since the earthquake—you’d best understand that. But—”

  “What is it?” Gerin asked, suspicion in his voice. Anyone who prefaced his remarks by denying he was going to criticize always ended up doing just that.

  “Well, Captain, all well and good we rescued the Sibyl here, even if she won’t let herself be touched by the likes of us. All well and good—better than well and good—you’ve figured out a place for her at Castle Fox if she picks up her letters as you hope. But we’re bringing back with us a lass who’s young and not the least comely I’ve seen—and what will sweet Fand say to that?”

  “Oh, father Dyaus.” Gerin didn’t know in detail the answer to that question, but contemplating it was plenty to make his head start aching. “She’ll wonder which of us aims to throw her out of the keep, and she won’t think a finger’s breadth past that—which will end up tempting me to throw her out even if the notion hadn’t crossed my mind till now.”

  “Just what I was thinking, Captain. Hard to have lustful thoughts about a woman who’d turn blue if you brushed her hand while you passed her a drumstick, but will Fand see it the same way? I ask you.”

  “Not likely.” One of the serfs in Besant’s village was a decent potter, not for any fancy ware but for serviceable cups and jars. Gerin had the feeling he’d be busy soon: when Fand got upset, crockery started flying. The Fox scowled at his friend. “Thank you so much. I wasn’t going to have any trouble staying awake through my watch anyhow. Now I wonder if I’ll ever sleep again.”

  Van started to bark laughter, then abruptly stopped. “Might not be safe sleeping in the same bedchamber, and that’s a fact, seeing how she stuck a knife into that Trokmê.”

  “Mm—there is that.” Gerin tried to look on the bright side: “Maybe she’ll take it all in good part, or maybe she’ll be so offended when we bring in Selatre that she’ll get up on her hind legs and take the next boat over the Niffet.”

  “Since when did Fand ever make anything easy, outside the bedroom, I mean?” Van said. He didn’t wait for an answer—which was as well, for Gerin had none to give him—but lay down again and soon began to snore loud enough to drown out Selatre.

  After a while, what precisely had happened at Ikos began to blur in Gerin’s mind with the tale he told of it at every peasant village and lord’s holding up along the Elabon Way. The disbelief he met was so strong that sometimes he began to doubt his own memory. Only when he looked to the former Sibyl at his side was he reassured he hadn’t imagined it all.

  “They’re a pack of fools,” Van said after the travelers rolled out of the keep of one of Ricolf’s vassals.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Gerin answered resignedly. “Had someone come to Fox Keep with our tale, would you have believed it?”

  “They’ll find out soon enough whether we’re telling the truth,” Van said. “And they’ll be sorry they think we aren’t.”

  The outlander’s pique lasted through a midday meal at the holding of Ricolf himself. Van, though, so loved to spin stories that telling Ricolf about what had happened at Ikos restored his good humor. Ricolf said, “Aye, we felt the quake here, and lost crockery in it, but I’d not looked for word so weighty as what you bring.”

  Seeing his former father-in-law at least willing to take him seriously, Gerin said, “You’d be wise to start thinking of ways to keep your peasants safe from the monsters as they spread, either by making sure they have a keep they can flee to or by posting armed men among ’em.”

  “Ah, Fox, you should have been a schoolmaster after all,” Ricolf said, smiling not quite enough to take the sting from his words. “You’re so good at telling everyone else what he should do; if only you’d try telling yourself as well.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Gerin said.

  Instead of answering directly, Ricolf got up from the table and walked out of the long hall into the courtyard. Gerin followed him. Ricolf paused by the well. Gerin started feeling foolish as he walked up to
him; if the older baron wanted to make a pleasantry at his expense, he should have ignored it. But he hadn’t, and now he’d lose more face by turning around and walking away than by going on.

  “What did you mean by that?” he repeated.

  “I believe you may not know, so I’ll answer straight,” Ricolf said. “Anything at all can happen to a person once; the gods delight in keeping us confused so we remember we’re not so wise nor so strong as they are. But when a man does something twice, that says more about him than about the way the knucklebones fall.”

  “You call that a straight answer?” Gerin said. “Dyaus preserve me from a twisty one, then—or Biton, if you aim to take the Sibyl’s station now that she’s let go of it.”

  “The Sibyl enters in, sure enough,” Ricolf answered, leaning back against the stonework of the well. “This is the second time now, Fox, you’ve snatched away women you had no proper business taking, Elise being the first.”

  Gerin exhaled in annoyance. “What was I supposed to do, Ricolf? Leave the Sibyl to be devoured by those—things? If I’d come here with that tale, you’d have found some other way to connect it to your daughter … and to blame me for it. It’s not as if I’m in love with Selatre.”

  “As I recall, you weren’t in love with Elise, either, not when you took off with her,” Ricolf said. “You were just bearing her to her uncle south of the Kirs. But those things have a way of changing.”

  “Ricolf, however our holdings have sometimes rubbed these past few years, have I ever used you with less than the courtesy any man owes the father of his wife?” Gerin asked. He waited for Ricolf to shake his head before he went on, “Then within that courtesy, I have to tell you you’ve got your head stuck right in the dung heap.”

  He took a wary step back. If Ricolf drew blade on him, he wanted room in which to fight. He had no great worries about holding off the older baron, but he wanted to be able to hold him off in a way which suggested to Ricolf’s warriors that he wasn’t trying to murder their overlord, merely protect himself.

  Ricolf stared as if he doubted his own ears. A flush turned his face as red as his hair had once been (Elise had had skin like that, the Fox remembered—transparent as a Trokmê’s). Then, to Gerin’s relief, a snort escaped his lips and turned into a guffaw. “All right, Fox, you win that one,” Ricolf wheezed, but he added, “For now, anyhow. A year or two down the road, we’ll see who laughs last.”

  “Oh, go howl,” Gerin said.

  “I’m done, I’m done.” Ricolf pacifically held up his hands. “Dyaus forbid I should try to tell you anything when you already know all that’s been written or thought by every wise man since the gods decided they’d like to have a ball they could kick around and made the world to give themselves something interesting to do: besides swiving one another, I mean, and if that gets stale for a man after a while, it likely does for the gods, too.”

  “Not by the tales that are told of them,” Gerin answered, but he let it go at that; Ricolf waxing philosophical struck him as unlikely enough to make a challenge unwise.

  And indeed, Ricolf’s next words were utterly mundane: “With all this hurrah behind you, you’ll be all in a sweat to get back to Fox Keep, so I don’t suppose you’ll stay the night. You’ll be wanting a trussed fowl, then, or some such, to hold the ghosts out of your head.”

  “Aye, that would be kind of you,” the Fox agreed. “Do you know, though, Selatre seems to calm them—not altogether, but partway—by herself. I suppose it’s because she was Biton’s intimate for so long.”

  “Does she?” Ricolf’s tone irked Gerin, but not enough to make him rise to it. The older baron shrugged and said, “I’ll see what sort of bird the kitchen crew can scare up for you.”

  Instead of a hen, Ricolf’s cooks presented Gerin with a trussed duck that tried to bite his hand and quacked furiously when he stowed it in the back of the wagon. It kept quacking, too. “Can’t say as I blame it,” Van remarked as he got onto the wagon’s seat himself. “I wouldn’t be happy if anybody did that to me, either.”

  “Can you tie something around its beak?” Gerin asked Selatre when the duck went right on making a racket after the wagon rolled out of Ricolf’s keep and headed up the Elabon Way once more.

  “Oh, let it squawk. What else can it do, poor thing?” Selatre said. Since she was in the back of the wagon with it and had to endure more of the noise than Gerin did, and since Van had already said more or less the same thing, the Fox let her have her way. Nonetheless, by the time the sun neared the western horizon, he looked forward to lopping off the duck’s head for more reasons than just keeping the ghosts happy.

  When they stopped to camp for the night, he steered the wagon off the road to a little pond that had enough saplings growing close by to screen it away from the casual glance of anyone on the road by night. Van got down and began gathering dry leaves and twigs for tinder.

  Gerin descended, too. He went around to the back of the wagon and said to Selatre, “Hand me out that pestiferous duck, if you please. We’ll eat him tonight, but he’s already had his revenge. My head aches.”

  The ex-Sibyl seemed merely practical, not oracular, as she picked up the duck by the feet and held it out to Gerin, warning, “Be careful as you take him. He’ll do his best to bite; he won’t just quack.”

  “I know.” Trying to take the duck from Selatre without touching her as he did so didn’t make things any easier for Gerin, but he managed, and didn’t bother mentioning the extra awkwardness. If that was how Selatre was going to be, he’d accept it as best he could.

  Once he had the duck, he set it on the ground. He made himself stand by and not offer Selatre a hand as she got down from the wagon, wondering all the while how long he’d need before not offering aid became automatic for him. Then Selatre stumbled over a root, exclaimed, and started to fall. Altogether without thinking, Gerin jumped forward and steadied her.

  “Thank you,” she said, but then stopped in confusion and jumped back from him as if he were hot as molten bronze.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, though apologizing for having kept her from hurting herself struck him as absurd.

  She shivered as she looked down at the arm he’d grabbed, then nodded with the same sort of deliberation Gerin had shown when he kept himself from helping her down a few moments before. “It’s all right,” she said. “However much I try to stay away from them, these things will happen now that I’m so rudely cast into the world. I may as well do my best to get used to them.”

  The Fox bowed. “Lady, on brief acquaintance I thought you had good sense. Everything you do—this especially—tells me I was right.”

  “Does it?” Selatre’s laugh came shaky. “If that’s so, why do I feel as if I’m casting away part of myself, not adding on anything new and better?”

  “Change, any change, often feels like a kick in the teeth,” Gerin answered. “When the Trokmoi killed my father and my elder brother and left me lord of Fox Keep, I thought the weight of the whole world had landed on my shoulders: I aimed to be a scholar, not a baron. And then—” He broke off.

  “Then what?” Selatre asked.

  Gerin wished he’d managed to shut up a few words earlier. But he’d raised the subject, so he felt he had to answer: “Then a few years ago my wife ran off with a horseleech, leaving me to raise our boy as best I could. His kidnapping was what made me come to Ikos.”

  “Yes, you’ve spoken of that.” Selatre nodded, as if reminding herself. “But if you hadn’t come, by everything else you’ve told me, the creatures that dwelt in the caves under Biton’s temple would have killed and eaten me after the earthquake.”

  “If the earthquake would have happened had I not come,” Gerin said, remembering the words of doom in the last prophecy Biton had issued through Selatre’s mouth.

  Van came around the wagon. “I’ve already got the fire going,” he announced. “Are you going to finish off that duck, or do you aim to stand around jabbering until the ghosts take away
what few wits you have left?” He turned to Selatre. “Take no notice of him, lady, when he gets into one of his sulks. Give him a silver lining, as you did, and he’ll make a point of looking for its cloud.”

  “To the hottest of the five hells with you,” Gerin said. Van only laughed. The nettle he’d planted under Gerin’s hide stung the worse for bearing a large measure of truth.

  The Fox dug a trench in the ground with his dagger, then drew sword and put an end to the duck’s angry squawking with a stroke that might have parted a man’s head from his shoulders, much less a bird’s. He drained the duck’s blood into the trench for the ghosts. Van took charge of the carcass. “It’ll be greasy and gamy, but what can you do?” he said as he opened the belly to get rid of the entrails.

  “Gamy or no, I like the flavor of duck,” Selatre said. “Duck eggs are good, too; they have more taste than those from hens.”

  “That’s so, but hens are easier to care for—just let ’em scavenge, like pigs,” Gerin said. He glanced around. “Even though we were slow with the offering, the ghosts are still very quiet. Lady, I think that’s your doing, no matter that we happened to touch again.”

  Selatre cocked her head to the side, listening to the ghosts as they wailed and yammered inside her head. “You may be right,” she said after she’d taken their measure. “I remember them louder and more hateful than this when I was still living in my village, before Biton made me his Sibyl. But I am Sibyl no more; the god himself said as much, and your touch sealed it—” She shook her head in confusion; the dark hair that had spilled over one shoulder flew out wildly.

  Gerin said, “I don’t think holiness is something you can blow out like a lamp. It doesn’t so much matter that I touched you—certainly I didn’t do it with lust in my heart, or aiming to pollute you. What matters is that the god touched you. My touch is gone in an instant; Biton’s lingers.”

  Selatre thought about that and slowly nodded, her finely molded features thoughtful. Watching her in the firelight, Gerin decided Van had been right: she was attractive enough to make Fand jealous. Was she more attractive than the Trokmê woman? Their looks were so different, the comparison didn’t seem worthwhile. But that it had even crossed his mind made him wonder if Ricolf hadn’t been wiser back at his keep than the Fox had thought at the time.