“I don’t,” Gerin assured him. “Good food and good drink are plenty for me, and you’ve given me those. As for the other, I’m happy enough with my wife not to care to look anywhere else, though I thank you all the same.”
“And what a daft notion that is,” Adiatunnus exclaimed. “Not that you’re happy, the which is as may be, but that your being happy back there would keep you from poking a wench here. What has the one to do with t’other? A friendly futter is worth the having, eh, no matter where you find it.”
The Fox shrugged. “If that’s how you want to live, I’m not going to say you shouldn’t. It’s your affair—and you can take that however you like. And since I’m happy enough to let other people do as they please, I’m even happier when they let me do the same.”
“You’re happy to drive a lesson home like a man splitting logs with an axe, too,” Adiatunnus retorted. “But all right, have it as you will, since you’re bound to, anyhow. And if you’re not fain to have yourself a good time, I’ll not be after making you do it. So there.”
Gerin laughed out loud and raised his own mug in salute. Not many men could puncture him at arguments of that sort, but Adiatunnus had just done it. That said something about how sharp the Trokmê’s wits-were, not that Gerin hadn’t already had a good notion of that. It also said Adiatunnus would make a useful ally—provided Gerin kept an eye on him.
The Trokmê’s leman found something interesting to do with her hand, too. Gerin wondered with abstract curiosity whether Adiatunnus would suddenly need to change his trousers. Before that happened, the woodsrunner got up and slung the girl over his shoulder—no small display of strength—and carried her upstairs while she laughed.
Gerin turned to Duren and said, “I daresay you’re learning some things here that you wouldn’t see at Fox Keep.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” his son answered, sounding very much like him. “Van and Fand do things like that sometimes.”
“Mm, so they do,” the Fox admitted. He thumped Duren on the shoulder and started to laugh, then got to his feet. “Well, now you’re going to see something you have seen before: I’m going to bed.” Also laughing, his son went up with him.
Van scratched his head, then, in fashion most ungentlemanly, reached inside his breeches and scratched there, too. He squashed something between his thumbnails, look at it, wiped it on his trouser leg, and let out a long sigh. “I’m going to have to go over myself for nits,” he said, and dug in the pouch at his belt for a fine-toothed wooden comb. As he started raking it through his beard and hissing as the thick, curly hairs got stuck, he shook a thick forefinger at Gerin. “And don’t you twit me about these cursed lice and where I got ’em. I know where I got ’em, and I had fun doing it, too.”
“Fine,” Gerin said. “You can have fun explaining to Fand where you got ’em, too.”
But Van refused to let that sally faze him. “There’s too many ways to—ouch!—pick up lice for anybody to be sure which one I found.”
That was true. Gerin, for his part, had fresh bedbug bites, courtesy of no one more intimate than whoever’d last slept in the bed Adiatunnus had given him and Duren. But he also knew that Fand, given a hundred possibilities, would always choose the one likely to lead to the wildest fight—and, this time, she’d be right.
The Fox didn’t waste a lot of time brooding over it, though he did spend a moment hoping he wouldn’t come down with lice himself. As he got grayer, the vermin and their eggs got harder to spot in his hair.
Getting the army ready to move soon made all such insectile worries seem of insectile size and importance. His own men were quickly ready to ride, whether on horseback or in their chariots. He’d never before watched the Trokmoi getting ready to move out on campaign—most of the campaigns on which they’d moved in these parts had been aimed at him. Now that he was watching them, he concluded they had to start days earlier than he would have to set out at the same time.
They bickered. They bungled. They got drunk instead of eating breakfast. They went off for a fast poke with a serving girl instead of eating breakfast. An Elabonian captain would have killed a couple of his men on the spot before he put up with insubordination the Trokmê leaders ignored.
When the woodsrunners had finally fought, they’d always done well against the Fox’s troopers. He had to hope the same would hold now. The longer he watched them—and he had a good long while to watch them—the more forlorn that hope seemed.
Adiatunnus was everywhere at once, shouting, blustering, cursing, cajoling. The chieftain did get his fair measure of respect, but, as far as Gerin could see, matters moved no faster because of the racket he made. Gerin had to hope Adiatunnus wasn’t making things slower, another hope that faded as the morning wore on.
Van muttered, “We’d have done better if the woodsrunners lined up with the Gradi, I’m thinking.”
“I wouldn’t argue,” Gerin said mournfully, watching two Trokmoi draw swords and scream at each other before their friends pulled them apart.
The closest Adiatunnus came to acknowledging anything was wrong came when he said, “Och, you’re ready a bit before us, looks like,” and gave a breezy shrug to show how little that mattered to him. The Fox, ignoring the way his stomach churned, managed to nod.
At last, with the sun a little to the west of south, not even the Trokmoi could delay any more. Their women calling last farewells, they rode west from Adiatunnus’ keep along with Gerin’s men. The Fox murmured a prayer to Dyaus that the campaign would end better than it had begun.
VI
Early omens were less than good. The army crossed the Venien River, which flowed into the Niffet, not far from where the Gradi had come down in their galleys and beaten the Trokmoi. Though the woodsrunners had burned the bodies of their comrades who had fallen, they still muttered among themselves as they passed the battlefield.
On the west side of the river—land that had been still in Elabonian hands, not under Adiatunnus’ control—the hair prickled up on Gerin’s arms for no reason he could see or feel. He kept quiet about it, doubting his own judgment, but after a while Van said, “The air feels—uncanny.”
“That’s it!” Gerin exclaimed, so vehemently that Duren started and the horses snorted indignantly. “Aye, that’s it. Feels like the air in the old haunted woods around Ikos.”
“So it does.” Van frowned. “We’ve been out this way a time or two, and it never did before. What’s toward, Fox? Your usual Elabonian gods, they don’t make a habit of letting folk know they’re around like this.”
“You’re right; they don’t, and they certainly never have around here—you’re right about that, too.” Gerin scowled. What followed from his words did so as logically as the steps in a geometric proof from Sithonia. “I don’t think we’re feeling the power of Elabonian gods.”
“Whose, then?” Van glanced around to make sure no Trokmoi could overhear him. “The woodsrunners’ gods are too busy brawling amongst themselves to pay much heed to impressing people.”
“I know,” Gerin said. “Folk get the gods they deserve, don’t they? So who’s left? Not us, not the Trokmoi, not …” He let that hang in the air.
Van had been many places in his travels, but never to Sithonia. Yet he needed to be no logician to see what Gerin meant. “The Gradi,” he said, his voice as sour as week-old milk.
“Can’t think of anyone else it could be,” the Fox said unhappily. He waved, trying to put into words what he felt. “We’re heading toward high summer now, but doesn’t the air taste more the way it would at the start of spring, when winter’s just loosed its grip? And the sun.” He pointed up to it. “The light’s … watery somehow. It shouldn’t be, not at this season of the year.”
“That it shouldn’t,” Van said. “I’ve lived here long enough to know you’re right as can be, Captain.” He shook his fist toward the west, toward the Orynian Ocean. “Those cursed Gradi gods are settling in here, making themselves at home, growing like toadstools after a rai
n.”
“My thought exactly,” Gerin said. “Voldar and the rest of them, they must be strong to do … whatever they’re doing. Dyaus and the Elabonian pantheon, they wouldn’t interfere with the sun.” He didn’t say, They couldn’t interfere with the sun, though that was in his mind, too. He didn’t know whether it was so or not. The Elabonian gods were so lax about manifesting themselves in the material world, he honestly didn’t know the full range of their power.
He didn’t know the full range of Voldar’s power, either, or the powers of the other Gradi gods and goddesses. He had the ominous feeling he was going to find out. This would have been a fine mild day, had it come a little before the vernal equinox. Drawing near the summer solstice, though …
Over his shoulder, Duren said, “I wish we could find out what the weather’s like back on the east side of the Venien. That would tell us more about whether what we’re worrying about is real or we’re shying at shadows.”
Gerin smiled. “There are times when I wish I could send Dagref down to the City of Elabon to learn all the things he can’t learn here in the northlands. Maybe you should go, too, for that’s reasoned like a scholar.”
“Aye, so it is,” Van rumbled, “but there’s more going on here than scholarship or whatever you call it. It’s not just the weather, lad. It’s what I feel in the hair on the nape of my neck, and I’m not talking about lice.” He set a hand on the flared neckpiece of his helmet.
“What do we do about it?” Duren said, yielding the point.
“Fight it,” Van declared. As usual, the world looked simple to him.
Gerin wished the world looked simple to him, too. Here, though, he saw no better answer than the one his friend had proposed.
By the time they camped, that first night west of the Venien, the Trokmoi were all edgy, looking over their shoulders and muttering to themselves over anything or nothing. The presence of the more stolid Elabonians seemed to steady them, as Gerin—and Adiatunnus—had hoped it would.
They were still in land under Gerin’s suzerainty, but not land where his control was as firm as it was closer to Fox Keep. The serfs hereabouts had not seen enough of him and his armies to have any confidence in their goodwill. They probably had seen enough of Trokmê raiders to have no confidence in them whatever. At first sight of a large force heading their way, they fled into the woods.
The warriors took—even Gerin did not like to think of it as stealing—enough chickens and sheep to sacrifice to keep the night ghosts quiet. Other than that, they did not harm the villages or the fields around them. They built great bonfires not only to hold the ghosts at bay but also to give themselves warning if the Gradi were close enough to dare a night attack.
To reduce the risk of that as much as he could, Gerin set scouts out all around the campsite, each small group with a fowl to offer so the ghosts would not trouble them in spite of their being away from the fires. Adiatunnus watched that with interest and attention; the Fox got the idea the Trokmê was storing the notion to use against him one of these years.
Swift-moving Tiwaz had come round close to first quarter. Math was almost full, while Nothos, though four days past, still had only a bit of his eastern edge abraded by darkness. Out where the light of the bonfires grew dim, men had three separate shadows, each pointing in a different direction.
Except to go out to stand sentry or to answer calls of nature, though, few men, either Elabonians or Trokmoi, strayed far from the fireside. The warriors either rolled up in their blankets or sat around talking, often with folk not of their own kin. Most of them understood and could speak at least some of the language of their hereditary foes, and most relished the chance to swap tales with the men they usually met with weapons, not words.
Drungo Drago’s son turned to Van and said, “Give us a tale, why don’t you?”
Instantly, all the Elabonians began clamoring for a tale from the outlander, too. He’d seen and done things none of them, Gerin included, could match, and he told a good story, too. Seeing how enthusiastic the Elabonians were to hear him, the Trokmoi started shouting, too.
“Well, all right,” Van said at last. “I thought I’d sooner sleep, and I thought a lot of you would sooner sleep, too, but who knows? Maybe I’ll put you to sleep and then get some myself. You’d like that, hey?”
Somebody threw a hard-baked biscuit at him. He caught it out of the air and went on without missing a beat: “Well, I’ve yarned a good deal about creatures of one kind or another I’ve seen, and those tales haven’t had too many people flinging their suppers my way, so maybe I’ll give you one of them just to stay safe. How does that sound?”
No one said no. Several warriors said yes, loudly and enthusiastically. Van nodded. “All right, then,” he said. “South and east of the City of Elabon, way south of the High Kirs, the coast of the Bay of Parvela runs southeast between Kizzuwatna, which is far away from here and hot as you please, to Mabalal, which is even farther, even hotter, and muggy to boot.” He looked around. The night, like the day, was cooler than it should have been. “Feels good to think about something hot right now, doesn’t it?”
His listeners nodded. Gerin wished he could put into a jar whatever his friend used to draw an audience into a story. Even if it wasn’t sorcery, it was magic of a sort.
Van went on, “Some of you, now, some of you may have heard I had to get out of Mabalal in a kind of a hurry once upon a time.” He got more nods, from a few of the Trokmoi and a lot of the Elabonians. He grinned; his teeth flashed white in the firelight. “By the gods, some of you have heard a whole raft of different reasons why I had to get out of Mabalal in a hurry. Now does that mean I get into a pack of trouble or I tell a pack of lies?”
“Both, most likely,” Drungo said. He wasn’t a match for Van in size or strength or speed, but he was a large, strong man, and confident of his prowess. Even so, he made sure he was grinning, too.
The outlander, busy shaping his story, didn’t take it for a challenge, as he might have in his younger days. He just said, “Well, I was there, and I’m the only one here who was, so nobody’ll prove anything on me, and that’s a fact. Anyway, there I was, sailing away from Mabalal up toward Kizzuwatna, getting away from whatever I was getting away from, and we put in at this miserable little port called Sirte.
“There’s only two reasons anybody would ever put in at Sirte. One is, you can fill your waterskins there. The water you get is harsh, and it can give you a flux of the bowels if you’re not used to it, but the spring never fails. And the other is that, a ways inland, there’s a grove of myrrh trees in a valley that some more springs water. If you can get the myrrh, which is a sticky resin that grows on the trees, you’ll sell it for a goodly price.”
“It’s one of the incenses they burn at Ikos, isn’t it?” Gerin put in.
“That it is, Fox.” Van nodded. “When we got to Sirte, maybe half of dozen of us—ne’er-do-wells every one, you’d say—we decided to see if we couldn’t get hold of some of this myrrh for our own selves, and strike out inland to see what we could do with it. I don’t know about the others, but me, I was sick of being cooped up on a ship.
“The folk at Sirte spoke some of the language of Mabalal, and so did we. When they got the drift of what we wanted to do, they told us to watch out for snakes on the way to the myrrh trees. We’d just come out of Mabalal, now, so we thought we knew something of snakes—I’ve told stories about the serpents there, I expect.”
“I liked the yarn about the snake with the stone in its head that was supposed to make you turn invisible, but didn’t,” Parol Chickpea said.
“For which I do thank you, friend,” Van said. “Aye, we thought we knew something of snakes, that we did, so when the folk of Sirte warned us of the kinds they had out there in their desert—the chersidos and the cenchris and the seps and the prester and the dipsas and the scytale and I don’t know what all other sorts they named—we just nodded our heads and said ‘Yes, yes’ when they told us about the different
kinds of venom the serpents had. We figured they were spinning tales to frighten us and make us stay away from the myrrh.”
The outlander shook his head. The firelight deepened the lines that carved his face and exaggerated his expression of rue. “Only goes to show what we knew, or rather, what we didn’t. We bought waterskins and filled ’em and trudged out into the desert toward the myrrh trees, which were about a day and a half’s travel inland from Sirte. The local folk shook their heads watching us go, as if they didn’t expect to see us ever again, which, truth to tell, they probably didn’t. To this day, if they remember us, they probably think we all perished in the desert. Lucky we are that we didn’t—or some of us didn’t, too.”
“I suppose the people of Sirte went back and forth to the myrrh trees every so often,” Gerin said. “If they looked for the snakes to get you, wouldn’t they have expected to find your bodies along whatever trail there was?”
“That’s a good question, Captain, and before I trod that trail I would have thought the same thing,” Van said, “that is, if I’d believed them about the snakes, which I can’t say I did. Like I told you, my notion was that they were just trying to scare us and keep us from going after the myrrh. I mean … well, hear me out and you’ll see.
“We’d been walking along for a bit when all of a sudden something reared up out of the sand and gravel and hit me a lick right here.” The outlander tapped his left greave, not far below the knee. “If I hadn’t been wearing it, there’s an awful lot of stories I wouldn’t have told since, and that’s the truth.
“I took a whack at the snake with my sword, and off flew its head. But we’d stirred up more than one, it turned out. Maybe the second was mate to the first. I won’t ever know that. I killed it, too, but not till after it bit one of my friends.
“It wasn’t a very big snake, and we hoped it wasn’t any of the kinds the locals had warned us about, but it turned out to be a seps, and oh”—Van covered his eyes with a hand—“how I wish it hadn’t been.”
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