Prince of the North

by Turtledove, Harry

  “In a way, it does,” the Fox said. “But only in a way—that’s why I called Adiatunnus half-smart. Now I’m warned. He’ll be gathering his forces, collecting more monsters, doing whatever he thinks he needs to do. And do you know what I aim to do in the meanwhile?”

  “What’s that, lord?” Notker asked.

  “I aim to hit him first.”

  The chariot hit a bump. Gerin’s legs kept him smoothly upright without conscious thought on his part. “How am I supposed to administer my holding if I’m too busy fighting to pay heed to anything else?” he asked.

  Van had adjusted as automatically as the Fox. He glanced over and answered, “I don’t know the answer to that one, but let me give you one in return: how are you supposed to administer your holding if the Trokmoi and the monsters swarm out and take it away from you?”

  “There you have me,” Gerin said. “If I can’t keep it, it isn’t truly mine. But if I can’t run it, it’s hardly worth keeping.” Schooling south of the High Kirs had left him fond of forming such paradoxes.

  Van cut through this one with the ruthless economy he usually displayed. “If you still hold on to it, you can always fix it later. If it’s lost, it’s gone for good.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Gerin said, but the admission left him dissatisfied. Endless warfare would hurl his holding back into barbarism faster than anything else he could think of. But, as Van had said, everything else turned irrelevant if he didn’t win each war.

  Along with his regathered host of vassals, he rolled southwest down the same road he’d taken to Adiatunnus’ border after Duren disappeared. This time, he wouldn’t stop and exchange polite chitchat with the Trokmê chieftain’s border guards. He’d go after Adiatunnus—and his monstrous allies—with all the might he had.

  Notker the Bald brought his chariot up alongside Gerin’s. He pointed ahead. “There’s my keep, off to one side. At our pace, we’ll make the village before sunset.”

  “So we will, and then roll through it,” Gerin said. As soon as the sun had started to swing down toward the horizon from its high point in the sky, he’d ordered a couple of chariots out two furlongs ahead of the rest. The Trokmoi were often too impatient to set proper ambushes, and he suspected the monsters Adiatunnus had taken as allies would be even less skilled in the stratagems of war.

  A puff of breeze from the west brought a whiff of something sickly sweet Raffo turned and wrinkled his nose. “Phew! What’s that stink?”

  “Dead meat,” Van answered.

  The Fox nodded. “We’re coming up on the village Mannor Trout got out of, or what’s left of it. Mannor didn’t lie, that’s certain.”

  The closer they got the worse the smell grew. Gerin coughed. The stink of carrion always made fear and rage bubble up in him: it called to mind the aftermath of too many fights, too many horrors.

  The serf village, though, was worse than he’d expected. He’d been braced for sprawled, bloated corpses and charred ruins, and they were there. He’d looked for the livestock to be run off or slain, and it was. He’d known the crows would rise in a black cloud and the foxes slink off into the woods when he disturbed them, and they did.

  But he hadn’t reckoned on so many of the pathetic corpses looking as they’d been mostly devoured before the scavengers started on them. His stomach did a slow flip-flop. He should have realized the monsters wouldn’t be fussy about where they got their meat. Intellectually, he had realized it. The implications, though, had escaped him.

  Van said, “I had thought to round up a hen or two here, to give to the ghosts come sundown and to cook up for us, too. But now I’m going to let that go. The gods alone know what these hens have been pecking at since the Trokmoi and their little friends went home.”

  Gerin’s stomach lurched again. “Reasoned like a philosopher,” he said Anthropophagy, even at one remove, was worth fighting shy of. A few minutes later, a pig stuck its head out of the bushes. No one shot at it. It was even likelier than any surviving village chickens to have fed on the bodies of those who had raised it.

  After making sure no life remained in the village, Gerin waved his arm. The chariots rattled on toward the border with the holding of Capuel the Flying Frog. How much of that now lay in the hands of the Trokmoi and the monsters was anyone’s guess. Few men said much about what they’d seen in the clearing, but a new, grim sense of purpose informed the force. They’d collect the payment due, and more.

  Just before sunset, a cock pheasant made the mistake of coming out from the woods onto a meadow to feed. Its ring-necked head came up in alarm when it saw, or perhaps heard, the chariots on the road. It began to run rapidly, then leaped into the air, its wings thuttering.

  Arrows hissed toward it. One of them, either cleverly aimed or luckier than the rest, brought the bird tumbling back to earth. “Well shot!” Gerin called. “Not only will it feed the ghosts, it’ll feed some of us, too.”

  “Aye, a pheasant’s tasty, no doubt of that,” Van said. “Me, though, I’d sooner hang it a while to let it get properly ripe before I cook it.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen you do that at Fox Keep once or twice,” Gerin said. “I don’t care for my meat flyblown, thank you very kindly. Besides, we’ve no time for such fripperies tonight. Bringing it down at all strikes me as a good enough omen.”

  “Flyblown’s not the point,” Van replied. “Bringing out the full flavor is. But you’re right about today: we just pluck it and gut it and put it over the flames or bake it in clay.”

  “Fuel for the fire,” the Fox agreed. “It’ll help us keep going. And then we’ll get into Adiatunnus’ lands and set some fires of our own.”

  For all Gerin knew, the Trokmê guards at the border to Adiatunnus’ holding might have been the same crew with whom he’d spoken when he came seeking Duren. This time, he didn’t get a close look at them. As soon as they saw his force of chariotry approaching, they cried “The southrons!” in their own language and fled. They got in among the trees before any of his men could shoot them like the pheasant.

  “Shall we stop and go after them, lord prince?” Raffo asked.

  “No,” the Fox answered. “We storm ahead instead. That way we get in amongst the woodsrunners faster than they have word we’re coming.”

  The first village his men reached was inhabited by Elabonian serfs who had acquired new masters in the five years since the Trokmoi swarmed south over the Niffet. When they realized the men in the chariots were of their own kind, they came swarming out of their huts with cries of exultation.

  “The gods be praised!” they shouted. “You’ve come to deliver us from the Trokmoi and from the—things.” With that seemingly innocuous word, half their joy at seeing Gerin and his followers seemed to evaporate, boiled away in the memory of overpowering fear. One of them said, “The Trokmoi are bad enough, stealing and raping and all. But those things …” His voice guttered out like a candle.

  “If you want to go, just pack whatever you can carry on your backs and run for my holding,” Gerin said. “The peasants there will take you in. The ground is thin of men these days, with so much war and plunder. They’ll be glad to have you, to help bring in a bigger crop.”

  “Dyaus bless you, lord,” the serf said fervently. Then he hesitated. “But lord, how shall we travel with these things loose in the woods and ready to swoop down on us?”

  “Take weapons, fool,” Van said. “Anything you have is better than nothing. Would you rather be eaten trying to get away or stay here till the monsters come into your house and eat you in your own bed?”

  “Truth to tell, lord,” the serf said, taking no chances on the outlander’s rank, “I’d sooner not be et at all.”

  “Then get out,” Gerin said. “Now we’ve no more time to waste gabbing with you. The Trokmoi and the monsters destroyed a peasant village in my land, just over the border from what used to be Capuel’s holding. Now they’re going to find out they can’t do that without paying the price for it.” He slapped Raff
o on the shoulder. The driver flicked the reins of the chariot. The horses started forward.

  The Fox put himself in the lead now, with Drago’s chariot right behind. The Bear would reliably follow him, and wouldn’t do anything foolish. That counted for more than whatever brilliant stratagems Rihwin might come up with, for Rihwin might just as easily do something to endanger the whole force.

  The road opened onto another clearing, this one recently hacked out of the woods. In it stood three or four stout wooden houses, bigger and sturdier than the round cottages in which most serfs dwelt. “Those are Trokmê homes,” Gerin said. “I’ve seen enough of them north of the Niffet.”

  “Let’s get rid of the Trokmoi in ’em, then,” Van said. One of those Trokmoi came out from behind a house. He stared in amazement that might have been comical under other circumstances at the Elabonians encroaching on what he’d come to think of as his land. That lasted only a couple of heartbeats. Then he let out a shout of alarm and dashed for shelter inside.

  Gerin already had an arrow in the air. It caught the woodsrunner in the small of the back. He went down with a wail. Gerin caught Van’s eye. “Try doing that with your precious spear,” he said.

  Another Trokmê came outside to see what the shouting was about. Gerin and Drago both shot at him—and both missed. He ducked back into the house in a hurry, slammed the door, and dropped the bar with a thump Gerin could hear across half a furlong.

  “Fire arrows!” Gerin yelled.

  A couple of chariots had firepots in them, half full of embers ready to be fanned to life. Others carried little bundles of straw soaked in pitch. While some of his men got real fires going, others tied the bundles to arrows, just back of the heads. Still others used shields to protect them from the Trokmoi, who started shooting at them from the windows of the houses.

  Trailing smoke, the fire arrows flew toward the woodsrunners’ shelters. Some fell short; some went wide—their balance was all wrong. But others stuck in wall timbers or the thatch of the roofs. Before long, smoke rose up from a dozen different places. The Trokmoi inside yelled at one another. Some of the voices belonged to women. One corner of Gerin’s mouth twisted down, but only for a moment. The Trokmoi hadn’t cared about women or children when they struck his holding. What did he owe them?

  The fires on the roofs grew and spread. The women’s cries rose to shrill shrieks, then suddenly stopped. Doors came open. Red- and yellow-mustached men charged out, half a dozen in all. Some had helms on their heads; two or three carried shields. They threw themselves at Gerin’s troopers with no thought for their own survival, only the hope of taking some Elabonians with them before they fell.

  “You’ll not have our wives and daughters for your sport,” one of them panted as he slashed at the Fox. “We’re after slaying the lot of them.”

  Van’s spear caught the woodsrunner in the side. The fellow wore no armor; it bit deep. Van twisted the shaft as he yanked it out. The Trokmê coughed bright blood and crumpled.

  Gerin looked around. None of the other woodsrunners was still on his feet. One of his own men swore as he bound up a slashed arm. That seemed to be the only wound his warriors had taken—they’d so outnumbered their foes that they’d dealt with them three and four and five to one, and not all of them had been engaged by a long shot.

  The houses kept on burning. Drago the Bear said, “That smoke’s going to give us away.”

  “It’s liable to,” Gerin agreed, “though fire gets loose easily enough, and it’s bloody hard to douse once it does. Adiatunnus and his lads will know something has gone wrong, but not just what—until we show up and teach ’em. Let’s get moving again.”

  Before long, they came to another peasant village—or rather, what had been one. Now several monsters from under the temple at Ikos stalked among the houses. More of them tore at the carcasses of a couple of oxen in the middle of the village square. They looked up, muzzles and hands red with blood, as Gerin’s chariot came into sight.

  Two or three monsters ran straight for the chariot, as any fierce beasts might have. Gerin shot one of them: a lucky arrow, right through the throat. That made the others hesitate, more thoughtful than any beasts would have been.

  But it also gave the rest of the monsters the chance to snatch up weapons: clubs, spears, and a couple of swords. Then they too rushed toward the Fox, their cries more like words than any he had heard from the creatures before.

  He had a bad moment or two there. There were a lot more monsters than he had men in the two lead chariots. He was about to order Raffo to wheel the horses around and retreat when reinforcements came rattling up.

  Some of the monsters kept on with the attack, again as beasts might have done. But others must have made the calculation he’d been on the brink of a short time before: they headed off into the woods, to fight another day.

  When the skirmish was done, Gerin pointed to the deserted huts in the village and said, “Torch the place. If those things were denning here, we don’t want to give them anyplace they can return to once we’ve gone.”

  More smoke rose into the sky. The Fox knew that whoever saw it would figure out something unusual was going on in the northeastern part of the land Adiatunnus had overrun. His lips skinned back from his teeth. He had reached the point where he was resigned to having a woodsrunner for a neighbor; Adiatunnus hadn’t acted much differently from Capuel the Flying Frog and the other Elabonian barons he’d displaced. But if Adiatunnus consorted with monsters—

  That led Gerin to another thought. As Raffo drove the chariot deeper into the Trokmê’s territory, the Fox said to Van, “I wonder how the monsters came to align themselves with Adiatunnus. Most of the ones we saw in Bevon’s holding wouldn’t have had the wit to do such a thing.”

  “If I had to guess, Captain, I’d say there’s smart ones and dumb ones, same as with people,” the outlander answered. “Say the smart ones are as smart as dumb people: that’d make the dumb ones like wolves or longtooths or any other hunting beasts. The smart ones’d have the wit for something like banding together with the Trokmoi, and maybe even for bringing along some of their stupid friends.” He laughed. “Makes ’em sound like half the folk we know, doesn’t it?”

  “More than half,” Gerin said. Van laughed again. The Fox went on, “I wish we didn’t have to waste time with all these little fights. I want to hit Adiatunnus as hard and sudden a blow as I can, but every skirmish we fight makes me slower to get to him and gives him more time to ready himself.”

  “Well, we can’t very well say to the woodsrunners we run into—or still less to these monsters—‘Sorry there, friend, we have more important things to do than slaughtering you right now. Can you hang about till we’re on our way back?’”

  Gerin snorted; when you put it that way, it was absurd. All the same, unease gnawed at him. Before he’d set out on this punitive raid, he’d seen it clearly in his mind: go into Adiatunnus’ territory, strike the Trokmoi—and with luck kill their chieftain—and then fare home again. Reality was less clear-cut, as reality has a way of being.

  Before long, his army rolled past the ruins of what had been a palisaded keep before the Trokmoi came south over the Niffet. The woodsrunners hadn’t bothered repairing the timbers of the outwall; instead, they’d built a dwelling of their own in the courtyard between the wall and the stone keep, turning the place into a sort of fortified village.

  A couple of Trokmoi were up on what was left of the wall, but they raised no alarm when Gerin’s chariot came into sight. “Are they all asleep?” he demanded indignantly. He didn’t like his enemies to act stupidly; it made him wonder what sort of ruse they were plotting.

  But Van smacked one fist into the palm of his other hand. “Me, I know what it is, Captain: they think we’re woodsrunners, too.”

  “By the gods, you’re right.” Gerin waved toward the distant stronghold. One of the Trokmoi waved back. The Fox frowned. “I don’t fancy going in after them. They could have enough men to make that exp
ensive—and it would cost us the speed and free movement the chariots give.”

  “More fire arrows?” Raffo said over his shoulder.

  “Aye, and maybe a muzzle for a mouthy driver, too,” Gerin answered, but he swatted the young man on the back to leave no doubt that was a joke. “We want to make sure none of them gets away, too, so what we’ll do is—”

  His chariot, and Drago’s with it, pulled off the road a little past the keep the Trokmoi had altered. That might have perplexed the men on the battered wall, but not enough to make them cry out. Even when the first chariots of the Fox’s main force came into view, they kept silent long enough to let the cars get well begun on forming a ring around the holding.

  “Southrons!” The cry in the Trokmê language floated across weedy fields to Gerin’s ears. “We’ve been cozened by southrons!”

  So they had, and by the time they realized it, they were too late to do anything about it. The Elabonian warriors shot arrows at any woodsrunner who appeared on the palisade. Some of them also shot fire arrows at the wooden palisade itself and over it at the roofs of the houses it sheltered. The timbers of the palisade caught only slowly; the same was not true for the dry straw thatching of those roofs.

  “Well, what’ll they do now?” Van said as several thick plumes of gray-white smoke rose from the courtyard.

  “Curse me if I know,” Gerin answered. “I don’t know what I’d do in that spot—try not to get into it in the first place, I suppose. But they don’t have that choice, not anymore.”

  Some of the Trokmoi took refuge in the stone keep in the center of the courtyard—Gerin saw bits of motion through its slit windows. He wondered if that would save them; the door and all the furnishings within were wood, and liable to catch fire … and even if they didn’t, so much smoke filled the air that anyone inside was liable to feel like a slab of bacon being cured.

  The Trokmoi had let the ditch around the palisade alone; shrubs and bushes grew in great profusion in it. That would have made matters easier for anyone who tried to lay siege to the castle, but it helped those inside now. Some leaped off the wall—not just men but also women with their skirts flying up around them as they jumped—to land in those bushes and shelter there from fire and foe alike.