When the Gradi caught sight of the oncoming column, the first thing they did was raise a loud, wordless cheer. “Yell back!” the Fox hissed to his own men, who did. A shout was a shout in any language.
One of the Gradi perfecting his axework was the first to notice that Gerin and his followers were not what they appeared to be. By then, though, they were less than a hundred yards from the drawbridge. The sharp-eyed Gradi let out a shout that, though still without words, was of altogether different tone from those his countrymen had been exchanging with Gerin’s masquerading warriors. He rushed at the Elabonians and Trokmoi, the sun glinting off the bronze head of his axe.
Several archers shot him. He fell before he got close to the attackers. “Run!” Gerin shouted, giving up the pretense. “We seize the gateway, we get inside, and we clean them out.”
Yelling for all they were worth, his men and Adiatunnus’ dashed for the drawbridge. The Fox wasn’t the first man onto it—some of the young bravos ran faster—but he wasn’t far behind. He wondered if the Gradi were going to raise it with warriors on it and inside the keep.
They didn’t, as they hadn’t tried raising it before their enemies reached it. When he stormed into the keep, Gerin realized the raiders from the north hadn’t kept any sort of gate crew on the winches that would have moved the bridge up or down. Maybe they hadn’t seen the need. Maybe castles in their own cold homeland had gates that worked differently. Whatever the reason, they made his work easier for him.
As soon as he and his men got inside the keep’s outer wall, the fight was as good as won. The Gradi would have done better to throw down their axes and beg for mercy. Not all of them even had axes, or helms, or leather jerkins. They’d been expecting no attack. Had they yielded, they would have lived.
With few exceptions, they would not yield. Instead, they hurled themselves at the Elabonians and Trokmoi with loud cries of “Voldar!” As had a couple of their warriors back at the peasant village, many of them, armed with nothing more than belt knives and stools and whatever they could snatch up, fought so fiercely, they made their foes slay them.
And they slew their foes, too. Outnumbered, outmatched, they still did a lot of damage. One of them, swinging a bench from the great hall, leveled a whole row of Elabonians, as if he were scything down wheat. A couple of the warriors who went down didn’t get up again, either: he’d managed to split their skulls.
His next flailing swipe with the bench almost took Gerin out with it. The Fox had to skip back in a hurry to keep from getting his ribs stove in. But a bench was an unhandy thing with which to make a backhand stroke. Gerin stepped forward, thrust his sword into the Gradi’s belly, twisted to make sure the stroke killed, and jerked the blade free. The Gradi toppled, clutching himself and howling.
Adiatunnus shouted in his own language: “Into the castle, now! We’ll not be letting ’em use it for refuge against us!”
Had the Gradi thought to do that, they might have given Gerin’s army a hard fight. Many of them tried to get into the great hall to lay hold of their weapons and then return to the fight out in the courtyard. When Elabonians and Trokmoi got in with them, the chance of using the castle as a citadel disappeared.
And when the fighting raged in the great hall as well as outside, the servants in the kitchen—Elabonians all—joined Gerin’s warriors, throwing themselves at the Gradi with kitchen knives and cleavers and spits and two-tined serving forks. They had no armor, they had no skill at fighting, some of them were women, but they had hatred and to spare. In the tight quarters, in the chaos, that let them bring down more than one of the men who had oppressed them, though more of their number fell making the effort.
After the great hall of the castle was forced, the battle became a hunt for any Gradi who still lived. The tall, pale, dark-haired men would find shelter and then spring out, selling their lives dear as they could. Before the sun went down, almost all of them were dead.
The castle servants helped there. They knew every hiding place in the keep, and led Gerin’s men to them one by one. The Gradi, deprived of surprise, wreaked a smaller toll than they might have otherwise.
“We won,” Adiatunnus said, looking around at the carnage with dazed, almost disbelieving eyes. “Who’d have thought we could lay into those omadhauns and beat ’em, the way they’ve pounded us like drums?”
“They’re only men,” Gerin said. From inside the castle, screams rose. The kitchen servants were having their revenge on some of the Gradi who yet lived. The air was thick with the smell of roasting meat. Gerin decided he didn’t want to know what sort of meat was being roasted.
He went to do what he could to help the wounded, sewing up gashes and setting broken bones. A physician down in the City of Elabon would no doubt have laughed at his efforts. Here in the northlands, he came as close to being a physician as anyone, and closer than most.
A skinny young woman came up to him with bread and beef ribs and ale. He took some, but said, “Here, you eat the rest. You look as if you need it more than I do.” The very idea of a scrawny kitchen helper struck him as strange.
So did the amazed way the woman stared. She started to cry. “The Gradi, they’d beat us or worse if we ate of what we made for them.” She didn’t talk for a while after that, instead cramming her mouth full of bread and beef. Then she asked, “Do you want me? I don’t have anything else I can give you for setting us free.”
“No, that’s all right,” Gerin answered. The young woman—young enough, easily, to be his daughter—didn’t look as if it was all right. She looked as if she wanted to punch him in the eye. So much for gratitude, he thought, a thought that frequently crossed his mind when he was dealing with human beings. The woman went off and approached a Trokmê. Gerin thought it likely that, if she wanted to thank him that particular way, he’d let her.
He was about to send a runner to order the chariots up to spend the night with the rest of the army when they came up without orders, a driver sometimes leading another team or two behind the car in which he stood. “Figured we wouldn’t break surprise now, and you might be able to use us,” said Utreiz Embron’s son, the warrior he’d left in charge of the chariotry.
“Nicely reasoned,” Gerin said with an approving nod. He’d thought well of Utreiz for years. The man thought straight and kept his eyes on what was important all the time. He was no swashbuckler, but he got the job done, and done well. He was, in fact, rather like a small-scale model of the Fox.
“I expected you’d have things well in hand,” he said now. “If they’d gone wrong, you’d have been yelling for us a long time ago.”
“That’s likely so,” Gerin agreed. He went on in a thoughtful tone of voice: “You know, Utreiz, this land is going to need reordering if we ever drive the Gradi out of it. I think you’d be a good man to install as a vassal baron.”
“Thank you, lord prince,” Utreiz said. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope you’d tell me something like that.” Gerin wondered if he ought to be annoyed Utreiz had anticipated him. He shook his head: no, not when he’d thought for years that the fellow’s mind worked like his.
He looked around to make sure his men up on the wall of the captured keep were more alert than the Gradi had been. He didn’t know how close their next large band was, and didn’t want to throw away the victory he’d won over them.
The harried Elabonian servitors at the keep assumed the Fox would want to sleep in the room the Gradi commander had used, and led him up to it when he said he was tired. One whiff inside convinced him he didn’t want to do that. Even by the loose standards of the Elabonian northlands, the Gradi were not outstandingly clean of person. He wondered whether that came from living in such a cold climate.
No matter where it came from, it made him go on down into the great hall and roll himself in a blanket there with his men. The racket in the hall was still loud, as warriors drank and refought the battle over and over again. The Fox didn’t care. After he’d learned to fall asleep with ne
wborn infants in the same room, nothing his men could do fazed him.
He was not a man who dreamed much or often remembered the dreams he had. When he found himself walking along a snowy path through a white-draped forest of pines, he thought at first he was awake. Then he realized he wasn’t cold and decided it had to be a dream, even though he hardly ever remembered having such a clear one. When he understood he was dreaming, he expected to wake up at once, as often happens when a dream is seen for what it is.
But he stayed asleep and kept walking down the path. He tried to force himself awake, but discovered he couldn’t. Fear trickled through him then. Once, years before, the Trokmê wizard Balamung had seized his spirit and made it see what the wizard would have it see. He hadn’t been able to fight his way from that dream till Balamung released him. Now—
Now, suddenly, the pines gave way. The path opened out into a snow-covered clearing dazzlingly white even under a leaden sky. And in the middle of that clearing stood a comely naked woman with long dark hair, twice as tall as the Fox, who held in her right hand an axe of Gradi style.
“Voldar,” Gerin whispered. In the silence of his mind, he thanked his own gods that the Gradi goddess had chosen to meet him in a dream rather than manifesting herself in the material world. He was in enough danger here in this place that was not a true place.
She looked at him—through him—with eyes pale as ice, eyes in which cold fire flickered. And he, abruptly, was cold, chilled in the heart, chilled from the inside out. Her lips moved. “You meddle in what does not concern you,” she said. He did not think the words were Elabonian, but he understood them anyhow. That left him awed but unsurprised. Gods—and, he supposed, goddesses—had their own ways in such matters.
“The northlands are my land, the land of my people, the land of my gods,” he answered, bold as he dared. “Of course what happens here concerns me.”
That divinely chilling gaze pierced him again. Voldar tossed her head in fine contempt. Her hair whipped out behind her, flying back as if in a breeze—but there was no breeze, or none Gerin could sense. In face and form, the Gradi goddess was stunningly beautiful, more perfect than any being the Fox had imagined, but even had she been his size, he would have known no stir of desire for her. Whatever her purpose, love had nothing to do with it.
She said, “Obey me now and you may yet survive. Give over your vain resistance and you will be able to live out your full span most honored among all those not lucky enough to be born of the blood of my folk.”
Did that mean the people who worshiped her or the people she’d invented? Gerin had never thought he’d have the chance to ask a god that philosophical riddle, and, with the moment here, discovered having the chance and having the nerve were two different things.
He said, “I’ll take my chances. I may end up dead, but that strikes me as better than living under your people—and under you. Or I may end up alive and free. Till the time comes, you never know—and we Elabonians have gods, too.”
Voldar tossed her head again. “Are you sure? If you do, where are they? Drunk? Asleep? Dead? I have hardly noticed them, I tell you that. The Trokmoi have gods—aye, gods who flee before me. But you folk here? Who would know? I think you pray to emptiness.”
Gerin knew he could not afford to give full heed to anything she told him. She had her own interest, and fooling him and dismaying him were to her advantage. But what she said about the Trokmê gods paralleled all too well what had happened in the material world for him to dismiss it out of hand. And what she said about Dyaus and the rest of the Elabonian pantheon put him in mind of his own thoughts … and his own worries. He wondered how much of the dream he would remember when he woke.
“I’ll take the chance,” he said. “The Trokmoi brought their gods south of the Niffet when they crossed over it some years back, and those gods do live in this land now, but they haven’t run off the gods we Elabonians follow. The Trokmoi haven’t conquered us, either, you’ll notice, as they surely would have if our gods were as weak as you say.”
“As I also told you, it’s the Trokmê gods who are weak,” Voldar answered. But she did not sound so grimly self-assured as she had before; maybe he’d given her a response she hadn’t expected. She gathered herself before resuming, “In any case, my people and I are not puny and foolish, as are the Trokmoi and their gods. We do not come here to visit or to share. We come to take.”
As far as Gerin was concerned, the Trokmoi had come for the same reason. But the Gradi and Voldar and the rest of their gods were much more serious, much more methodical about it than the woodsrunners.
Voldar went on, “I tell you this: if you stand against us, you and your line shall surely fail, and it will be as if you had never been. Be warned, and choose accordingly.”
For a moment, Gerin knew stark despair. Voldar had struck keenly at his deepest secret fear. Almost, he was tempted to give in. But then he remembered Biton’s verses promising Ricolf’s barony to Duren. Had the farseeing god been lying to him? He had trouble believing that. He wondered if Voldar had so much as sensed Biton’s presence in the land, the Sibyl’s shrine being far from anywhere the Gradi had reached and Biton himself being only superficially Elabonian. He did not ask. The more ignorant the Gradi and their gods remained of the northlands, the better off their opponents would be.
He also wondered whether Voldar had yet encountered whatever older, utterly un-Elabonian powers dwelt under the Sibyl’s shrine, the powers controlling the monsters. Then he wondered if there were any such powers. So much he didn’t know, even after a busy lifetime in the world.
“What is your answer?” Voldar demanded when he did not speak.
“Who can say whether what you tell me is the same as what will be?” he replied. “I guess I’ll take my chances fighting on.”
“Fool!” Voldar screamed. She stabbed out a finger at him. Cold smote, sharp and harsh as any spear thrust. He clutched at his chest, as if pierced—and woke up, panting, his heart pounding with fear, in the great hall of the keep he and his army had just seized.
Adiatunnus was lying a few feet away. No sooner had Gerin’s eyes flown open in the gloom of guttering torches than the Trokmê chieftain gave a great cry—“The hag! The horrible hag!”—in his own language and sat bolt upright, his pale eyes wide and staring.
Several warriors muttered and stirred. A couple of men woke up at Adiatunnus’ shout and complained before rolling over and going back to sleep. Adiatunnus gaped wildly, now this way, now that, as if he did not know where he was.
“Did you just visit a certain goddess in your dreams?” Gerin called quietly. He still didn’t know whether mentioning Voldar by name would help make her notice him, but, after what he’d just seen, he didn’t want to find out, either.
“Och, I did that,” Adiatunnus answered, his voice shaky. He needed a moment to realize why Gerin was likely to be asking the question, a telling measure of how shaken he was. His gaze sharpened, showing his wits beginning to work once more. “And you, Fox? The same?”
“The same,” Gerin agreed. “She—whoever she was”—no, he’d take no chances—“tried to frighten me out of going on with the campaign. What happened to you?”
“Just the look of her turned the marrow in me to ice for fair,” Adiatunnus said, shivering. “Humliest wench I’m ever after seeing, and that’s nobbut the truth. And the blood running from the jaws of her, it came from some good Trokmê god, I’m thinking, puir fellow.”
“Ugly? Blood? That’s not how she showed herself to me,” Gerin said, more intrigued than surprised. Gods were gods, after all; of course they could manifest themselves in more than one way. “She was beautiful but terrible, fear and cold and awe all mixed together. What I thought was, No wonder she’s chief among all the Gradi gods.”
“We saw her different, that we did,” Adiatunnus said with another shudder. “I wonder which was her true seeming, or if either one was. We’ll never ken, I’m thinking. However you saw here, though, what
did the two of you have to say to each other?”
As best he could, Gerin recounted his conversation with the Gradi goddess, finishing, “When I told her I wouldn’t give up, she—I don’t know—flung a freeze at me. I thought my heart and all my blood would turn to ice, but before that happened, I woke up. What befell you?”
“You said her nay?” Adiatunnus asked in wondering tones. “You said her nay, and she didn’t destroy you?”
“Of course she destroyed me,” Gerin answered irritably. “Look—here you are, talking with my blasted corpse.”
Adiatunnus stared, then frowned, then, after a long moment, started to laugh. “Fox, it’s many a time and oft I’ve wished to see the dead corp of you, blasted or any way you choose. The now, though, I’ll own to being glad you’re still here to give me more in the line of troubles.”
“I thank you for that in the same spirit you meant it,” Gerin said, squeezing another chuckle out of Adiatunnus. The Fox went on, “What did … she … say or do to make you wake up with such a howl?”
“Why, she showed me the ruin of everything I’d labored for all these years, if I was to go on with the war against her people,” the Trokmê answered.
“And you believed her?” Gerin said. “Just like that?”
“So I did,” Adiatunnus said with yet another chuckle. “What I want to know is, why you didna.”
“Because I assumed she was lying to me, to put me in fear and make me lose heart,” Gerin said. “If I were a Gradi god, it’s what I’d do. You Trokmoi are a tricksy folk—have you no trickster gods?”
“Aye, we do that,” Adiatunnus admitted. “But the goddess in my dream, now, she’s not that sort, not from all the tales of her I ken, any road. And the Gradi, they’re not that sort, either. They come and they take and they kill and they go, with hardly even a smile to say they’re enjoying the work.”
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