“If you want to know what pepper trees are like, think of willows—they look much like ’em, right down to the clusters of fruit. The trouble with ’em is, they grow on the steepest hillsides and cliffs, so people have a beastly time getting to ’em to take away the pepper.”
“Probably why it costs so much by the time it gets here,” Gerin said.
“Likely so, Captain. Now the folk of Mabalal are lazy, like I said. If we had to hope for them to climb hillsides and cliffs to gather the pepper fruits, it’d cost more than it does, I tell you true. What they do instead is get the monkeys to work for ’em, or maybe trick ’em into it would be a better way to put it.”
“What’s a monkey?” asked a warrior from an isolated keep, a man who never went more than a couple of hours’ walk from his holding unless on campaign.
“A monkey is a beast about the size of a half-year babe that looks like a furry, ugly little man with a tail,” Van answered patiently. “They live in trees, and have thumbs on their feet as well as their hands. They’re clever and mischievous, almost like children, and they cause a lot of trouble stealing things and ruining them.
“The other thing about monkeys is, they like to do what people do—and the folk of Mabalal, who live with ’em the same way we do with dogs and cats, know it. There are whole bands of these monkeys, mind you, that live in the rough country where the pepper trees grow. So when the Mabalali want to get themselves some pepper, what they do is this: they go down to the foothills below the rough country and pick all the fruit off some of the trees there. Then they dump piles of the fruit in little clearings they’ve made close by, and they pretend to up and leave.
“Now, all the while the monkeys have been watching them from the high ground. The monkeys go and they pick the fruits from the pepper trees, and then they come down and they drop them in the clearings just the same way they’d seen the men do it. Sometimes they’ll steal the fruit the Mabalali have left, sometimes they won’t. Either way, the Mabalali get the pepper, and they get it without having to do the hard work themselves. So you see, sometimes being lazy isn’t such a bad thing after all.”
The warriors buzzed appreciatively, as they would have at any tale well told. For them it was a pleasant way to pass the time and a story to remember so they could tell it in turn. Gerin also liked it on those terms, but it set him thinking in a different way, too. “I wonder how many useful things have come from men’s being too lazy to keep on doing things the same old hard way,” he mused.
“Give me a for-instance, Captain,” Van said.
That made the Fox scratch his head. At last he said, “Take the fellow who thought of the wagon. Wouldn’t you bet he was sick of hauling things on his back?”
“Ah, I see what you’re saying,” Van said. “Likely so.”
“And the fellow who first brewed ale, what was he sick of?” Rihwin asked. With a grin, he answered his own question: “Seeing straight, I suppose.”
Gerin and Van both laughed at that, but Drago the Bear drew in a sharp, disapproving breath. “No man first brewed ale,” he said flatly. “’Twas the gift of the god Baivers, and any who don’t want his anger had best remember it.”
Rihwin opened his mouth for what Gerin was sure would be a reply taken straight from the philosophers of the City of Elabon. Before that reply could emerge, Gerin forestalled it: “Rihwin, my fellow Fox, I trust you do recall the difficulties you had with Mavrix god of wine not so long ago?”
“Well, yes, I do,” Rihwin said reluctantly. “I did not believe, however, that you of all people in the northlands would stifle the full and open discussion of ideas of all sorts. I—”
Gerin took him by the arm. “Here, walk with me,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument. When the two men were as far from the fire and the blood offering as the wailing of the ghosts would let them go, Gerin continued in a low voice, “For all your study, one thing you never learned: there’s a time and a place for everything. If you want to start arguments about the nature and powers of the gods, don’t do it when you’re heading out on campaign. I want my men’s thoughts focused on two things: working with one another and slaughtering any monsters they happen across. Does that make sense to you?”
“I suppose so,” Rihwin said, though he sounded sulky. “Yet you would be hard-pressed to deny that in theory—”
Gerin cut him off again, this time with a sharp chopping gesture of his left hand. “Theory is wonderful,” he said. “What we have here is fact—if the men quarrel among themselves, they won’t fight well. You do anything more to make them fight worse than they would otherwise and I’ll leave you behind at the first keep we come to, or at a peasant village failing that. Do you understand me?”
“Oh, indeed.” Rihwin angrily tossed his head; firelight glinted from the gold hoop in his left ear. “You’re a hard man when you take the field, lord prince Gerin the Fox.” He loaded Gerin’s title with scorn.
“War is too important a business to be slack with it,” Gerin answered, shrugging. “Will you do as I say and not stir up disputes among the gods, or shall I leave you? Those are your choices, sirrah.”
Rihwin sighed. “Let it be as you say. You’d do better, though, if you learned to ease men into doing your will rather than hammering them into it.”
“No doubt.” Gerin sighed, too. Rihwin had nothing wrong with his wits, only a dearth of common sense. “And you’d do better if you thought more before you started talking or doing things. We all try to be the best men we can, and we all fail in different ways. Which watch do you have tonight?”
“The middle one.” Rihwin’s mobile features assumed an expression of distaste.
“There, you see?” Gerin said. “If your head held as much sense as a cabbage, you’d be asleep already instead of standing here arguing with me. Go curl up in your blanket.”
“The power of your reasoning ravishes me yet again,” Rihwin cried. Gerin snorted and made as if to kick him in the backside. The transplanted southerner lay down and soon fell asleep. Gerin had the midwatch, too, but stayed awake a good deal longer.
When the Fox’s chariots rolled down into Bevon’s holding, all the local barons shut themselves up right in their keeps and prepared to stand siege. “You just want to bite out another piece of our land,” one of them called from his palisade when Gerin came up to the wall.
“That’s not so,” Gerin answered, wondering if the white rag he bore would protect him from the lordlet’s archers. As he had so many times before, he spoke of the monsters that had erupted from the caves beneath Biton’s temple.
And, as had happened too many times before, he met only disbelief. The petty baron laughed scornfully. “You’re supposed to be clever, Fox. I’d have thought you could come up with a better excuse than that to come down on your neighbors.”
“Have it as you will” The Fox knew he sounded weary, but couldn’t help it. “You’ll find out soon enough whether I’m telling the truth. When you learn I am, maybe you’ll remember some of what I’ve said.” He turned and walked back to the chariot where Van and Raffo waited. No one shot at him, so he just rode on.
Down at the southern border of Bevon’s holding, Ricolf’s men were no longer wary of the force Gerin used to hold the Elabon Way open. They’d seen the monsters for themselves—seen more of them than the Fox had, as a matter of fact. He spent the first couple of hours after he arrived asking questions.
“Some of the creatures are smarter than others, lord prince, seems like,” one of Ricolf’s troopers said. “I’ve seen a couple carrying sword or axe, and one even with a helm on its ugly head. But others’ll either charge or run off, just like wild beasts.”
“Interesting.” Gerin plucked at his beard. “How many of them are there, would you say, and how much damage have they done?”
“How many? Too many, that’s sure,” the trooper said. “As for damage, think how much fun wolves would be if they had more in the way of wits, and hands to let them get into things doors
and gates keep them out of.”
Gerin thought about it. He didn’t like the pictures that painted themselves in his mind. Elabonians were in the habit of calling Trokmoi wolves because of their fierce raids, but they had humanly understandable motives: they were out for loot and captives as well as slaughter for its own sake. Beasts that hunted and killed without grasping, let alone using, the concepts of mercy and restraint were daunting in an altogether different way.
The Fox thanked Ricolf’s man and went back to pass the word to his own warriors. “One thing’s certain,” he said when he’d given them the grim news: “These creatures won’t act like a regular army of men. They aren’t an army at all, not really. Instead of trying to storm up the Elabon Way in a mass, I look for them to spread through the woods by ones and twos and maybe packs—no larger groups or bands or whatever you want to call them.”
“If that’s so, lord Gerin, we might as well not have brung these here chariots,” Widin Simrin’s son said.
“For fighting, you’re right,” the Fox answered, letting his young vassal down easy. “But we’d have been another two or three days on the road if we’d footed it down here.”
Widin nodded, abashed. Drago the Bear said, “What’ll you have us do with the cars, then? We can’t go into the woods with ’em, that’s certain, and you say the woods is where we’ll find these things.” He shook his head in somber anticipation. “You’re going to make foot soldiers out of us, I know you are.”
“Do you see that I have any choice?” Gerin asked. “Here’s what I’m thinking: we’ll split up by chariot crews, with teams of three crews sticking together in teams. That’ll give each team nine men, which should be enough to hold off even a pack of the creatures. At the same time, we’ll have eight or ten teams spreading out along the border between Bevon’s and Ricolf’s holdings, and that ought to give us a chance to keep a lot of the beasts from slipping farther north.”
“What about the ones that are already over the border?” Van asked. “How are you going to deal with them?”
“Bevon’s vassals, or rather Bevon’s sons’ vassals, will slay some of them,” Gerin said. “That should convince them the things are real and dangerous. As for the others, we’ll just have to hope there aren’t too many.”
“Fair enough,” Van said, to Gerin’s relief. The Fox’s great fear—one he didn’t want to speak aloud to his followers lowers—was that, like the Trokmoi, the monsters would permanently establish themselves in the northlands. If men couldn’t rid the woods of wolves, how were they to be free of creatures cleverer and more vicious than wolves?
He divided his men into teams of nine, and appointed a leader for each band. He had contrary misgivings about naming Drago and Rihwin: the one might miss things he ought to find, while the other got in trouble by being too inventive. But they were both better than anyone else in their bands, so he spoke their names firmly and hoped for the best.
He ordered half the teams to head east from the Elabon Way, the other half west. “We’ll go out for three days, hunt for a day, and then come back,” he said. “Anybody who’s not back to the road in seven days’ time and hasn’t been eaten to give him an excuse will answer to me.”
Eastbound and westbound forces headed out from the highway; the Fox and his chariot crew were in the latter. At first each half of the little army tramped along as a single body, the better to overawe any of the local nobles who might be tempted to fare forth against them. Men chattered and sang and, after a while, began to grumble about sore feet.
When morning had turned to afternoon and the sun sank toward the horizon, Gerin turned to the team headed by Widin Simrin’s son. “You men go back and forth through the woods hereabouts,” he said. “The rest of us will push on, then leave another team behind, then another, and another, so when we’re through we’ll have men all along the border. Do you see?”
“Aye, lord” Widin answered. “That means at the end of our reach, though, so to speak, we won’t be able to search for as long as we will here closer to the Elabon Way.”
“True enough,” the Fox said, “but I don’t know what we can do about it. Travel takes time, and there’s no help for it.” He nodded approvingly to Widin; that was a much better point than the one he’d raised before. Gerin hadn’t worked the implications of his strategy through so logically himself. “When we get back to Fox Keep, would you be interested in learning to read and write?”
“No, lord prince,” Widin replied at once. “Got better things to do with my time, I do—hunting and wenching and keeping my vassals and serfs in line.” He sounded so sure of himself that Gerin subsided with a sigh and did not push the question.
With Widin’s team left behind, the rest tramped on. They took a game track through a stand of oaks and emerged on the far side at the edge of cleared fields in which peasants labored. The peasants stared at them in horror, as if they were so many monsters themselves, then fled.
Their cries of terror made Gerin melancholy. “This holding has seen too much war,” he said. “Let’s push ahead without harming anything here: let them know not every warrior is out to steal what little they have.”
“A wasted lesson if ever I heard one,” Van said. “The next band through here, so long as it isn’t one of ours, will treat them the way they expect us to.” Gerin glared at him so fiercely that he hastened to add, “But we’ll do it your way, Captain—why not?”
Evening came before the Fox reckoned the time ripe to detach another piece of his force. Along with the men he had with him, he tossed knucklebones to see who would stand watch through the night. He felt like cheering when he won the right to uninterrupted sleep. No sooner had he cocooned himself in his blanket and wriggled around a little to make sure no pebbles poked his ribs than he knew nothing of the world around him.
A hideous cry recalled him to himself: a wailing shriek part wolf, part longtooth, part madman. He sat up and looked around wildly, wondering for a moment where he was and what he was doing here. His gaze went to the heavens. Tiwaz, nearly full, stood high in the south; ruddy Elleb, a couple of days past fullness, was in the southeast. Crescent Math had set and Nothos not yet risen. That put the hour a little before midnight.
Then all such mundane, practical thoughts vanished from his head, for the dreadful call again rang through the woods and across the fields. Some men started up from their bedrolls, grabbing for bow or sword. Others shrank down, as if to smother the cry with the thick wool of their blankets. Gerin could not find it in himself to blame them; the scream made him want to hide, too.
In a very small voice, someone said, “Is that the cry these monsters make?”
“Don’t know what else it could be.” Van sounded amazingly cheerful. “Noisy buggers, aren’t they?” Course, frogs are noisy, too, and a frog isn’t hardly anything but air and legs.”
Gerin admired his friend’s sangfroid. He also admired the way the outlander had done his best to make the creatures from the caves seem less dangerous; he knew they were a great deal more than air and legs.
The frightful cry rang out yet again. “How are we to sleep with that racket?” Widin Simrin’s son said.
“You roll up in your blanket and you close your eyes,” Gerin said, not about to let Van outdo him in coolness. “We have sentries aplenty; you won’t be eaten while you snore.”
“And if you are, you can blame the Fox,” Van put in, adding. “Not that it’ll do you much good then.”
Off in the distance, almost on the edge of hearing, another monster shrieked to answer the first. That sent ice walking up Gerin’s back, not from terror at the faraway cry but because it said the creatures that made those dreadful sounds were spreading over the northlands. Gerin wondered how many more were calling back and forth farther away than he could hear.
The one nearby kept quiet after that. Exhaustion and edgy nerves fought a battle over the Fox; exhaustion eventually won. The next thing he knew, the sun was prying his eyelids open. He got up and stre
tched, feeling elderly. His mouth tasted like something scraped off the bottom of a chamber pot. He walked over to a tree, plucked off a twig, frayed one end of it with the edge of his dagger, and used it to scrub some of the vileness from his teeth. Some of his men did the same, others didn’t bother.
Rihwin, who’d grown up south of the High Kirs, was so fastidious that even frayed twigs didn’t completely satisfy him. As he tossed one aside, he said, “In the City of Elabon they make bristle brushes for your mouth. Those are better by far than these clumsy makeshifts.”
“If you like, you can teach the art to one of the peasants who makes big brushes for rubbing down horses,” Gerin said. “We might be able to sell them through the northlands—not many southern amenities to be had hare these days.”
“My fellow Fox, I admire the wholeheartedness of your mercenary spirit,” Rihwin said.
“Anyone who sneers at silver has never tried to live without it.” Gerin looked around. “Where’d Van go?”
“He walked into the woods a while ago,” Widin said. “He’s probably off behind a tree, taking care of his morning business.”
The outlander returned a few minutes later. He said. “When you’re done breaking your fast, friends, I want you to come with me. I went looking for the spot where that thing made a racket last night, and I think I found it.”
Several of the men were still gnawing on hard bread and sausage as they followed Van. He led them down a tiny track to a clearing perhaps a furlong from the camp. The carcass of a doe lay there. Much of the hindquarters portion had been devoured.
A scavenging fox fled from the carcass when the men came out of the woods. Van said to Gerin, “I hope your name animal hasn’t ruined the tracks I saw. I’d be liable to think ill of it if it has, and I know you wouldn’t like that.” He walked over to the doe, grunted. “No, looks like we’re all right. Come up a few at a time, all of you, and have a look at what the ground shows.”
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