“Woodsrunners cheering me?” The Fox shook his head. “The only time I ever thought the Trokmoi would cheer me was after I died.”
Diviciacus rode near enough to hear that. “We tried to arrange it, Fox dear, time and again we did,” he said, “and we’d have cheered like madmen if we’d done it. But things being as they are—”
“Yes, things being as they are,” Gerin agreed. Without the Trokmoi, he wouldn’t have become baron of Fox Keep, wouldn’t have set forth on the path that had made him prince of the north. The woodsrunners had ambushed his father and older brother, putting an end to his hopes of passing his days as student and scholar.
And, on returning from the City of Elabon to take up the barony, he’d sworn never to stop taking revenge on the barbarians for what they’d done to him and his. Over the years, he’d taken that revenge many times and in many ways. And now he found himself allied to the Trokmoi against a danger he and they both recognized as worse than either was to the other. Did that leave him forsworn?
He didn’t think so. He hoped not. He hoped the spirits of his father and brother understood why he was doing what he was doing. He thought his brother would. Of his father, he was less certain. The Dagref after whom he’d named his first son by Selatre had not been the most flexible of men.
The Fox shrugged. Regardless of what his father would have thought, he’d chosen this course and would have to see it through. What came afterwards, he’d sort out afterwards.
He knew the way to the keep Adiatunnus had held as his own since the Trokmê invasion after the werenight. He’d been that way before, with soldiers at his back every time. He’d had to fight his way through Adiatunnus’ holding then. The Trokmoi welcomed him and his men now.
Trokmoi were not the only folk still living on the land, of course. A good many Elabonian peasants remained, serfs toiling for tall, fair overlords now, not for barons of their own race. Whenever he rode past one of their villages, Gerin wondered how much that bothered them. He suspected they cared only how much of their crops their overlords, whoever those overlords were, exacted from them and how much those overlords interfered in the day-to-day routine of their lives.
He passed a couple of strongpoints he’d burned out in his last serious campaign against Adiatunnus, more than a decade before. One had been rebuilt, the other was still in ruins. Here and there in his holding, ruins remained from the werenight, well before that. The Trokmoi were moving at a pace not too far from his own.
When night fell, the Elabonians stopped at a village dominated by a stockaded building too large and strong to be a house, too small to be a castle. Several Trokmê warriors dwelt there with their wives and children, plainly to lord it over the Elabonian serfs who lived in the usual huts of wattle and daub. Had Gerin extended his dominions to the forests of the Trokmoi north of the River Niffet, he might have used a similar system, save with Elabonians controlling woodsrunners.
Golden Math, just past first quarter, floated high in the south when the sun set. Pale, slow-moving Nothos, full or a day past, rose in the east during evening twilight. Elleb, approaching third quarter, would not come up till nearly midnight, while Tiwaz was too close to the sun to be seen.
“I wonder what the Gradi call the moons,” Gerin said, staring up at Math from his seat close to a fire outside the village.
“That I can’t tell you, Captain,” Van answered. He paused to use a thumbnail to pry at a piece of mutton stuck between two back teeth, then resumed: “I’m amazed at how much of their speech has come back to me, now that I’ve had to try using it again, but I never was much interested in finding out about the moons. Maybe if some Gradi lass had looked up at ’em while I was on top of her—but she’d have been thinking about other things, or I hope she would.”
“You are impossible,” Gerin said, “or at least bloody improbable.”
“Thank you, Fox,” his friend answered. Gerin gave up and wrapped himself in his blanket. He had plenty of sentries out. Even in the worst of times, the Trokmoi weren’t likely to brave the ghosts for a night attack, and his men and theirs were supposed to be allies. Nevertheless, he hadn’t got as old as he had by taking needless chances. Knowing he’d taken none here, he slept sound.
Warriors Gerin led had—once—reached the village around the keep Adiatunnus had taken for his own. They’d fought their way in among the houses there, but never had managed to force their way into the keep. With both Trokmoi—men and women—and monsters opposing them, they’d lost men too fast to make the assault worthwhile even if it did succeed.
And now here they were, more than ten years later, coming up to Adiatunnus’ fastness once more. This time, no monsters fought them; the monsters, all save Geroge and Tharma, were back in the trackless caverns under Biton’s temple at Ikos. The Trokmoi—men and women—stood in the narrow, rutted streets of the village, shouting for the Elabonians till their voices grew raw and hoarse. The drawbridge to the keep was down, and Adiatunnus rode out from it to greet the Fox. The last time Gerin had come this far, the two of them had done their best to kill each other, and they’d both nearly succeeded.
“Rein in,” Gerin told Duren. The Fox also held up a hand to halt the rest of his chariots. His son pulled back on the reins. The horses obediently came to a stop.
Adiatunnus halted his own car perhaps twenty feet from Gerin’s. He got out of it and walked half the distance before going down on one knee in the roadway. The watching Trokmoi sighed.
Gerin jumped down from his chariot and hurried over to Adiatunnus. The Trokmê chieftain clasped his hands together, Gerin covered them with his own, and they went through the same rituals of homage and fealty in person as they had by proxy through Diviciacus.
Speaking the Trokmê tongue so his folk could follow, Adiatunnus said, “I want no misunderstanding, now. You are my lord, and I own it’s so. What you’re after ordering me and mine to do against the Gradi, that we’ll do, and promptly, too. You’ll find us no more trouble than any of your other vassals.”
The Fox noted Adiatunnus’ reservation—he would take orders against the Gradi, but hadn’t said anything about other orders. Gerin decided not to make an issue of it. Maybe the alliance against the new invaders would lead to better things later, maybe it wouldn’t. For now, he wouldn’t argue that it was necessary.
Also speaking the woodsrunners’ language, he said, “Glad we are to have your valiant warriors with us in the fight. We’ll teach the Gradi they chose the wrong foes when they decided to trifle with us.”
The Trokmoi yelled and cheered; Gerin doubted they’d ever given any Elabonian a greeting like the one he was getting. Most of his own men understood the Trokmê speech well enough to have followed what he was saying. They cheered, too.
Some of them, he saw, had their eyes on Trokmê women, many of whom were strikingly pretty and who had a reputation among the Elabonians for easiness. Gerin knew that reputation was not altogether deserved; it was just that Trokmê women, like their menfolk, said and acted on what they thought more readily than most Elabonians. But, as Fand had taught him, you tried going too far with them at your peril. He hoped no trouble would spring from that.
Adiatunnus waved back toward his keep, whose drawbridge remained down. “Come in, Fox, come in, and the men of you, too. I’ll feast the lot of you till you’re too full to futter, that I will.” Maybe he’d been watching Gerin’s troopers eyeing the Trokmê women, too.
“For my men, I thank you,” Gerin said. Save for insults on the battlefield, this was the first time he’d exchanged words with Adiatunnus. The Trokmê chief was close to his own age, a couple of digits taller and a good deal thicker through the shoulders and through the belly, with a balding crown and long, drooping fair mustaches now going gray. He wore a linen tunic and baggy woolen trousers, both dyed in checks of bright and, to Gerin’s eye, clashing colors.
He was studying the Fox with the same wary care Gerin gave him. Seeing Gerin’s eye on him, he chuckled self-consciously and s
aid, “I’ve always been after thinking you’re so high”—he reached up as far as he could—“with fangs in your mouth and covered all over with fur or a viper’s scales, I never could decide which. And here, to look at you, you’re nobbut a man.”
“And you likewise,” Gerin answered. “You’ve given me enough trouble for any other ten I could name, though; I tell you that.”
“For which I thank you,” Adiatunnus said, preening a little. His eyes were an odd shade, halfway between gray and green, and quite sharp. Looking intently at Gerin, he went on, “Ah, but if one o’ them ten you could name was Aragis the Archer, now, would you still be telling me the truth?”
“Not altogether,” the Fox admitted, and Adiatunnus preened again, this time admiring his own cleverness. Gerin said, “If you won’t let me flatter you now, how am I supposed to fool you later?”
Adiatunnus stared at him, then started to laugh. “Och, what a wonder y’are, Fox, I’ve been glad to have you for a neighbor betimes, that I have, for you’ve taught me more than a dozen duller men could have done.”
“For which I suppose I thank you,” Gerin said, at which Adiatunnus laughed again. The Trokmê was telling the truth there. Over the years, Gerin had noted, Adiatunnus, more than any other Trokmê chieftain, had learned from the Elabonians among whom he’d settled. He played far more sophisticated—and far more dangerous—political games than his fellow woodsrunners, most of whom still seemed hardly better than bandits after all these years.
The game he was playing now was designed to make him seem a good fellow to the Fox and his warriors, and to make them forget they were more likely to be his foes than his friends. When he wanted to use it, he had a huge voice. He used it now, bellowing in Elabonian, “Into the keep, the lot of you. The meat and bread want eating, the beer wants drinking, aye, and maybe the lasses want pinching, though you’ll have to find that out your own selves.”
Gerin tried to shout just as loudly: “Any man of mine who drinks so much today that he’s not fit to travel tomorrow will answer to me, and I’ll make him sorrier than his hangover ever did.” That might also keep his men from getting so drunk they started fights, and from being too drunk to defend themselves if the Trokmoi did.
“The same goes for my warriors,” Adiatunnus said in his speech and in Elabonian, “save only that they answer to me first and then the Fox, and they’ll care for neither, indeed and they won’t.”
Roast meat was roast meat, though the Trokmoi cooked mutton with mint, not garlic. Some of the bread the serving women set before the warriors struck Gerin as odd: thick and chewy and studded with berries. It wasn’t what he ate at home, but it was good. He wasn’t so sure about the beer. It wasn’t ale, nor anything like what he and other Elabonians brewed, coming almost black from the dipper and tasting thick and smoky in his mouth.
Adiatunnus drank it with every sign of enjoyment, so it evidently was as it was supposed to be. “Aye, we make the pale brew, too,” the Trokmê chieftain said when Gerin asked him about it, “but I thought you might be interested in summat new, you having the name for that and all. You roast the malted barley a good deal longer here, you see, so it’s nearly burnt, before you make it into the mash.”
“I’ll bet the first fellow who brewed this did it by accident, or because he was careless with his roasting,” Gerin said. He took another pull and smacked his lips thoughtfully. “After you get used to it, it’s—interesting, isn’t it? A new way of doing things, as you say.”
“When all this is done, I’ll send a brewer to Fox Keep to show you the making of it,” Adiatunnus promised.
“When all this is done, if you’re able to send him and I’m able to receive him, I’ll be glad to do that.” Gerin drained his mug of beer. Getting up to fill it with another dipper of that dark brew seemed the most natural thing in the world, so he did.
Van had other ideas about what the most natural thing in the world might be. If he got any friendlier with that serving woman—a lively redhead who, Gerin thought, looked a lot like Fand—they’d be consummating their friendship on top of the table, or maybe down in the rushes on the floor.
Gerin peered around for Duren but didn’t see him. He wondered whether his son had found a girl for himself or was just off visiting the latrine. When Duren didn’t come back right away, the first guess seemed more likely.
“A fine-looking lad y’have there,” Adiatunnus said, which made the Fox start a little; he wasn’t used to anyone save Selatre or sometimes Van thinking along with him. Adiatunnus went on, “Am I after hearing the grandfather of him is a dead corp, the which puts him in line for that barony?”
“That’s so,” Gerin agreed. He eyed the Trokmê with genuine respect. “You have your ear to the ground, to have got the news so soon.”
“The more you know, the more you can do summat about,” Adiatunnus answered, a saying that might have come straight from the Fox’s lips.
Gerin peered down into the black and apparently bottomless mug of beer. When he looked up again, Duren was coming back into the great hall, a smug look on his face. That eased Gerin’s mind; after the boy had been kidnapped when he was small, the Fox wasn’t easy about letting him out of his sight.
Turning to Adiatunnus, Gerin said, “It will be strange, riding alongside you instead of at you.”
“It will that.” Adiatunnus knocked back the black beer in his mug at a single gulp, then sat there slowly shaking his head. “Strange, aye. But you southrons, now, you’ve no fear of the Gradi, have you?”
“No more than I do of you,” Gerin answered. “By the fight they made with us, they’re brave and they’re strong, but so are you Trokmoi—and so are we.”
“I canna tell you what it is, Fox,” Adiatunnus said, his features sagging in dismay, “but when we face ’em, summat always goes wrong for us. And when you get to the point where you expect to have a thing happen, why, happen it will.”
“Yes, I’ve seen that,” Gerin said. He remembered Kapich, his Gradi prisoner, sneering at the Trokmê gods. Whether that had anything to do with the woodsrunners’ bad luck against the Gradi, he couldn’t have said, but the notion wouldn’t have surprised him.
Adiatunnus said, “When we go against the Gradi, now, how will you work it? Will you mix our men together like peas and beans in the soup pot, or do you aim to keep ’em apart, one group from the other?”
“I’ve been chewing on that very thing,” Gerin said, noting with some relief that Adiatunnus really did seem to accept his command. “I’m leaning toward mixing: that way, it’s less likely your warriors or mine will think the other bunch has run off and left ’em in the lurch. How do you feel about it?”
He asked for more than politeness’ sake; Adiatunnus had proved himself no fool. The Trokmê said, “Strikes me as the better notion, too. If we’re to have an army, it should be an army now, if you ken what I’m saying.”
“I do.” Gerin nodded. “My chief worry is that your men won’t follow my commands as quickly as they might, either because they think I’m trying to put them in more danger or just out of Trokmê cussedness.”
“As for the first, I trust it won’t be so, else I’d never have bent the knee to you,” Adiatunnus said. “You fight hard, Fox, but you fight fair. As for t’other, well, there are times when I wonder you Elabonians don’t bore yourselves to death, so dull you seem to us.”
“I’ve heard other Trokmoi say as much,” Gerin admitted, “but, of course, they’re wrong.” He brought that out deadpan, to see what Adiatunnus would do with it.
The chieftain frowned, but then started to laugh. “Try as you will, lord prince—I should be saying that now, eh? being your vassal and all, I mean—you’ll not get my goat so easy.”
“Good,” Gerin said. “So. You’re flighty to us, and we’re dull to you. What of the Gradi? You know them better than we do.”
“Belike, and how I’m wishing we didna.” This time, Adiatunnus’ frown stayed, making his whole face seem longer. “They’r
e—how do I say it?—they’re serious about what they do, that they are. It’s not your fault you’re in their way, mind you, but y’are, and so they’ll rob you or kill you or whatever they like. And if you have the gall to be offended, mind, then they’ll get angry at you for trying to keep what’s always been yours.”
“Yes, that fits in with what I’ve seen,” Gerin agreed. “They’re very sure of themselves, too: they don’t think we can stop them. That goddess of theirs, that Voldar—”
Adiatunnus twisted both hands into an apotropaic sign. “Dinna be saying that name in this place. A wicked she-devil, no mistake.” He shivered, though the inside of the great hall was smoky and hot. “Wicked, aye, but strong—strong. And the others—” His fingers writhed again.
You fear her, eh? Gerin started to ask that aloud, but held his tongue. Dabbling in magic had taught him how much power lay in words; saying something could make it real. Voldar undoubtedly knew—or could find out—Adiatunnus’ feelings about her, but putting words in the air made it more likely the Trokmê chief would draw her notice.
“Father Dyaus will prosper our enterprise,” Gerin said, and hoped the chief Elabonian god was paying as much attention to him as Adiatunnus feared the chief Gradi goddess was paying to him. Dyaus usually seemed content to reign over those who worshiped him without doing much to rule them. Gerin had always taken that for granted. Only in facing the Gradi had he come to realize it had drawbacks as well as advantages.
He was distracted from such musings when a very pretty Trokmê girl less than half Adiatunnus’ age sat down on the chieftain’s lap. Adiatunnus was holding a mug of black beer in one hand. The other closed over her breast through her tunic. The public display of what Gerin would have kept private didn’t disturb her; indeed, she seemed proud Adiatunnus acknowledged she’d captured his affection, or at least his lust.
“And can I be finding you summat lively in the line of women?” the Trokmê chieftain asked. His hand opened and squeezed, opened and squeezed. “I’d not want you to think me lacking in hospitality, now.”
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