King of the North

by Harry Turtledove

  Duren jumped up into the car and took the reins from Van, who’d been holding them, saying, “When my duties farther north are done, I’ll come back here. The gods willing, we’ll have many years together.” He flicked the reins. The horses trotted forward. The rest of Gerin’s little army followed.

  The Fox looked back over his shoulder. There in the roadway stood Authari Broken-Tooth, Ratkis Bronzecaster, Wacho Fidus’ son, and Hilmic Barrelstaves. They were arguing furiously, their men crowding around them to support one or the other. Gerin liked that fine.

  Half a day south of Fox Keep, Gerin spied a chariot heading his way. At first he thought it belonged to a messenger, heading down toward Ricolf’s holding with news so urgent, it couldn’t wait for his return. The only sort of news that urgent was bad news.

  Then the driver of the car held up a shield painted in white and green stripes: a shield of truce. “Those are Trokmoi!” the Fox exclaimed. A few years earlier, he wouldn’t have been able to recognize them as such at so long a distance, but his sight was lengthening as he got older. That made reading hard. He wondered if there was a magic to counter the flaw.

  He had little time for such idle thoughts: a moment later, he recognized one of the Trokmoi in the car. So did Van, who named the fellow first: “That’s Diviciacus, Adiatunnus’ right hand.”

  “His right hand, aye, and maybe the thumb of the left,” Gerin agreed. “Something’s gone wrong for him, or he’d not have sent Diviciacus out to try to make it better—and probably to diddle me in the process, if he sees a chance.”

  The Trokmoi made out who Gerin was at about the same time as he recognized Diviciacus. They waved and approached. Duren stopped the team. The rest of Gerin’s men halted their chariots behind him.

  “What can we be doing for you, now?” Gerin called in the Trokmê tongue.

  “Will you just hear the sweet way he’s after using our speech?” Diviciacus said, also in his language. He quickly switched to Elabonian: “Though I’d best be using yours for the business ahead to be sure there’s not misunderstandings, the which wouldn’t be good at all, at all.” Even in Elabonian, he kept a woodsrunner’s lilt in his voice.

  “The years haven’t treated you too badly,” Gerin remarked as Diviciacus got out of his chariot. The Trokmê was thicker through the middle than he had been when he was younger, and white frosted his mustache and the red hair at his temples. He still looked like a dangerous man in a brawl, though—and in a duel of words.

  “I’ll say the same to your own self,” he answered, and then astonished Gerin by dropping to one knee in the roadway, as Ratkis Bronzecaster had done for Duren. As the Trokmê clasped his hands together in front of him, he said, “Adiatunnus is fain to be after renewing vassalage to your honor, lord prince, that he is.”

  “By the gods,” Gerin muttered. He stared at Diviciacus. “It took the gods to get me his allegiance the last time he gave it. I always thought—I always said—I’d need them again to get him to renew it. Before I accept it, I want to know what I’m getting … and why.”

  Still on that one knee, Diviciacus replied, “Himself said you’d say that, sure and he did.” His shoulders moved back and then forward as he sighed. “He’d not do it, I tell you true, did he not find worse in these lands south o’ the Niffet than you’d be giving him.”

  “Ah, the Gradi,” Gerin said. “A light begins to dawn. He wants my help against them, and reckons the only way he’ll get it is to pretend to be a good little boy for as long as he needs to, and then to go back to his old ways.”

  Diviciacus assumed a hurt expression. He did it very well—but then, he’d had practice. “That’s not a kind thing to be saying, not even a bit of it.”

  “Too bloody bad,” Gerin told him. “The only debt I owe your chief is that I had my retainers gathered against him at Fox Keep when the Gradi raided us, and so I was able to throw them back without too much trouble.”

  “Would that we could say the same,” Diviciacus answered gloomily. “They lit into us, that they did. I gather you’re after hearing about their raid on us by boat, and that they did it in the aftermath of striking you.”

  “Yes, I heard of that,” Gerin answered. “If they hadn’t hit us and you, Adiatunnus and I would be at war now, I suppose, and you wouldn’t have to come to me and swallow his pride for him.”

  Diviciacus winced. “Sure and you’ve an evil tongue in the head o’ you, Fox. They say that in the olden times a bard could kill a man by no more than singing rude songs about him. I never would have believed it at all till I met you.” He held up a hand; a gold bracelet glittered on his wrist. “Don’t thank me, now. You’ve not yet heard what I’m about to tell you.”

  “Go on,” Gerin said, concealing his amusement; he had been about to thank the Trokmê for noting the bite of his sarcasm. “What haven’t I heard that you’re about to tell me?”

  “That the black-hearted omadhauns struck us again ten days ago, this time coming by land, and that they beat us again, too.” Diviciacus bared his teeth in an agony of frustration. “And so, for fear of worse from them, Adiatunnus will fight alongside you, will fight under you, will fight however you choose, for the sake of having your men and your cars in the line with us. Whatever should befall after that, even if it’s you turning into our master, it’s bound to be better nor the Gradi ruling over us.”

  He shivered in almost superstitious dread. The Trokmoi who’d come in the chariot with him gestured to avert evil. The Gradi whom Gerin had captured took beating the woodsrunners for granted. Evidently the Trokmoi felt the same way about it. That worried Gerin. What sort of allies would the Trokmoi make if they broke and fled at the mere sight of their foes?

  He asked Diviciacus that very question. “We fight bravely enough,” the Trokmê insisted. “It’s just that—summat always goes wrong, and curse me if I know why. Must not be so with you southrons, not if you beat the Gradi the once. With you along, we’ll do better, too—I hope.”

  “So do I,” Gerin told him. He mulled things over for a bit, then went on, “Come back to Fox Keep with me. This is too important to decide on the spur of the moment.”

  “However you like it, lord prince,” Diviciacus answered. “Only the gods grant you don’t take too long deciding, else it’ll be too late for having the mind of you made up to matter.”

  When they started north up the Elabon Way toward Fox Keep, Gerin told Duren to steer his chariot up alongside the one in which Diviciacus rode. Over squeals and rattles, the Fox asked, “What will Adiatunnus say if my whole army comes into the land he holds as his own?”

  “Belike he’ll say, ‘Och, the gods be praised!—them of Elabonians and Trokmoi both,’” Diviciacus answered. “More than half measures we need, for true.”

  “And what will he say—and what will your warriors say—when I tell them to fight alongside my men and take orders from my barons?” the Fox pressed.

  “Order ’em about just as you wish,” Diviciacus said. “If there’s even a one of ’em as says aught else but, ‘Aye, lord Gerin,’ take the head of the stupid spalpeen and be after hanging it over your gate.”

  “We don’t do that,” Gerin said absently. But that wasn’t the point. Diviciacus knew perfectly well that Elabonians weren’t in the habit of taking heads for trophies. What he meant was that Adiatunnus and his men were desperate enough to obey the Fox no matter what he said. Given Adiatunnus’ pride in the strength he’d had till the Gradi struck him, that was desperate indeed. Unless … “What oath will you give that this isn’t a trap, to lead me to a place where Adiatunnus can try to take me unawares?”

  “The same frickful aith I gave your lady wife when she put me the same question,” Diviciacus said: “By Taranis, Teutates, and Esus I swear, lord Gerin, lord prince, I’ve told you nobbut the truth.”

  If swearing by his three chief gods would not bind a Trokmê to the truth, nothing would. Gerin smiled a little when he heard Selatre had asked the same guarantee of Diviciacus: Biton
didn’t speak through her these days, but she saw plenty clear on her own. “Good enough,” the Fox said.

  “I pray it is; I pray you’re right,” Diviciacus told him. “The priests, they’ve been edgy of late, indeed and they have. It’s as if, with the gods o’ the Gradi so near ’em and all, our own gods have taken fear, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “I think perhaps I do,” Gerin said after a moment’s pause. The Gradi prisoners had also boasted of how much stronger their gods were than those of the woodsrunners, and again seemed to know whereof they spoke.

  Diviciacus sent Gerin a keen look. “You know more of this whole business than you let on, I’m thinking.” When Gerin didn’t answer, the Trokmê went on, “Well, that was ever the way of you. Adiatunnus, he swears you stand behind him and listen when he’s haranguing his men.”

  “With the way Adiatunnus bellows, I wouldn’t need to be that close to overhear him,” Gerin said. Diviciacus chuckled and nodded, acknowledging the hit. Gerin was careful not to deny possible occult means of knowledge. The more people thought he knew, the more cautious they’d be around him.

  The one thing he wished as the chariot clattered northward was that he really knew half as much as friends and foes credited him with knowing.

  “Are we ready?” Gerin looked back at the throng of chariots drawn up behind him on the meadow by Fox Keep. The question was purely rhetorical; they were as ready as they’d ever be. He waved his arm forward, tapping Duren on the shoulder as he did so. “Let’s go!”

  They hadn’t gone far before Diviciacus’ chariot came up beside Gerin’s. “It’s a fine thing you do here, Fox, indeed and it is,” the Trokmê said. Then his face clouded. “Still and all, I’d be happier, that I would, were you bringing the whole of your host with you and not leaving a part of ’em behind at Castle Fox.”

  “I’m not doing this to make you happy,” Gerin answered. “I’m not doing it to make Adiatunnus happier, either. I’m doing it to protect myself. If I leave Fox Keep bare and the Gradi come up the Niffet again”—he waved back toward the river—“the keep falls. I don’t really want that to happen.”

  “And if your men and Adiatunnus’ together aren’t enough to be beating the Gradi, won’t you feel the fool, now?” Diviciacus retorted.

  “Those are the risks I weigh, and that’s the chance I take,” Gerin said. “If I could bring my whole army, and Adiatunnus’, too, down the Niffet against the Gradi, I’d do that. I can’t, though. The Gradi control the river, because they have boats beside which ours might as well be toys. And as long as that’s true, I have to guard against their taking advantage of what they have. If you don’t care for that, too bad.”

  “Och, I’d not like to live inside your head, indeed and I wouldn’t,” Diviciacus said. “You’re after having eyes like a crayfish—on the end of stalks, peering every which way at once—and a mind like a balance scale, weighing this against that and that against this till you’re after knowing everything or ever it has the chance to happen.”

  Gerin shook his head. “Only farseeing Biton has that kind of power. I wish I did, but I know I don’t. Seeing ahead’s not easy, even for a god.”

  “And how would you know that?” Diviciacus said.

  “Because I watched Biton trying to pick out the thread of the future from among a host of might-bes,” Gerin answered, which made the Trokmê shut up with a snap. Diviciacus knew that Gerin had made the monsters vanish from the face of the earth, but not how he’d done it or what had happened in the aftermath of the miracle.

  They soon left the Elabon Way and rolled southwest down lesser roads. Serfs in the fields alongside the dirt tracks stood up from their endless labor to watch the army pass. One or two of them, every now and then, would wave. Whenever that happened, Gerin waved back.

  Diviciacus stared at the serfs. “Are they daft?” he burst out after a while. “Are they stupid? Why aren’t they running for the woods, aye, and taking the livestock with ’em, too?”

  “Because they know my men won’t plunder them,” the Fox answered. “They know they can rely on that.”

  “Daft,” Diviciacus repeated. “I’ll not tell Adiatunnus, for himself wouldna credit it. He’d call me drunk or ensorceled, so he would.”

  “I had trouble making sense of it when I first came here, too,” Van said sympathetically. “It still strikes me strange, but after a while you get used to it.”

  “For which ringing endorsement of my ideas I thank you very much,” Gerin said, his voice dry as the dust the horses’ hooves and chariot wheels raised from the road.

  “Think nothing of it,” Van said, dipping his head.

  “Just what I do think of it, and not a bit more,” Gerin said.

  Both old friends laughed. Diviciacus listened and watched as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing and seeing. “If any of our Trokmoi, now, bespoke Adiatunnus so,” he said, “the fool’d be eating from a new mouth slit in his throat, certain sure he would, soon as the words were out of his old one.”

  “Killing people who tell you you’re a fool isn’t always the best idea in the world,” Gerin observed. “Every so often, they turn out to be right.” Diviciacus rolled his eyes. That wasn’t the way his chieftain handled matters, so, as far as he was concerned, it had to be wrong.

  They came to the keep of Widin Simrin’s son late the next day. Widin and Diviciacus greeted each other like old neighbors, which they were, and old friends, which they weren’t. “Better you southrons for friends nor the Gradi,” Diviciacus told him, and that seemed to suffice.

  Widin had a good-sized garrison quartered at his keep: had Adiatunnus begun the war against Gerin rather than the other way round, those troopers would have done their best to slow the Trokmê advance and buy the Fox time to move down and deal with the woodsrunners. “So we’ll really be on the same side as the Trokmoi?” Widin said to Gerin. “Who would have believed that at the start of the year?”

  “Not I, I tell you for a fact, but yes, we will,” Gerin replied. “The Trokmoi would rather work with us than with the Gradi, and from what I’ve seen of the Gradi, I’d rather work with the Trokmoi than with them, too.”

  “I haven’t seen anything of them, lord prince,” Widin said, “but if they’re rugged enough to make the Trokmoi cozy up to us like this, they must be pretty nasty customers.” He grinned wryly. “I won’t be sorry to move out against the Gradi myself, I tell you that much. You go feeding a good-sized crew of warriors for a while and you start wondering whether anything’ll be left for you to eat come winter.”

  “You don’t sing me that song, Widin,” Gerin told him. “I sing it to you.” His vassal baron grinned and nodded, yielding the point. The Fox had been feeding a lot more warriors for a lot longer than Widin. The Fox had also made the most thoroughgoing preparations for feeding and housing a lot of warriors of any man in the northlands, save perhaps Aragis the Archer—and he would have bet against Aragis, too.

  Ruefully, Widin said, “And now, of course, the whole army guests off me, even if it is for only the one night.”

  “I don’t see you starving,” Gerin observed, his voice mild.

  “Oh, not now,” Widin answered. “The apples are harvested, and the pears, and the plums. The animals are getting fat on the good grass. But come the later part of next winter, we’ll wish we had what your gluttons will gobble up tonight.”

  “Well, I understand that,” Gerin said. “The end of winter is a hard time of year for everyone. And Father Dyaus knows I’m happy to see you thinking ahead instead of just living in the now, the way so many do. But if we don’t beat the Gradi, how much you have in your storerooms won’t matter to anyone but them.”

  “Oh, I understand all that, lord prince,” Widin assured him. “But since you take so much enjoyment complaining about every little thing, I wouldn’t think you’d begrudge me the chance to do the same.”

  “Since I what?” The Fox glowered at his vassal, much as if he were serious. “I expect
to hear that from Van or Rihwin, not from you.”

  “Can’t trust anyone these days, can you?” Widin said, now doing a wicked impression of Gerin himself. The Fox threw his hands in the air and stalked off, conceding defeat.

  By the extravagant way Widin fed the army that had descended on his castle, his plea of hunger to come had been a case of averting an evil omen, nothing more. As if to extract some sort of revenge on the lesser baron, Gerin ate until he could hardly waddle off to his blanket. He committed gluttony again the next morning, this time because he knew what sort of country lay ahead.

  The land between Widin’s holding and Adiatunnus’ territory belonged to no one, even if it was formally under Gerin’s suzerainty. The Fox and the Trokmê chieftain had been probing for advantage down there for years; even after giving Gerin homage and swearing fealty, Adiatunnus conducted himself like an independent lord.

  Caught between two strong rivals, most of the peasants who had farmed that land in the days before the werenight were dead or fled now. Fields were going back to meadows, meadows to brush, and brush to saplings. Looking at some pines as tall as he was, Gerin thought, This is how civilization dies. When his army—or Adiatunnus’—wasn’t crossing this country (on dirt roads also vanishing from disuse), it belonged more to wild beasts than to men. And it bordered his own holding. That was a profoundly depressing thought.

  Adiatunnus had pushed his border station north and east, toward the edges of Gerin’s land. More than once, Gerin had moved against the Trokmoi with an army, routing his enemy’s guards and overturning the prevaricating boundary stones they would set up to support their claims. When he and his army came upon the Trokmê guards now, the red-mustachioed barbarians cheered and waved their long bronze swords in the air.

  Laughter rumbled from Van. Turning to Gerin, he said, “There’s something you’ve never seen before, I’ll wager.”