A Handful of Men: The Complete Series

by Dave Duncan

  With pale face and clenched fists, Vork did as the skald had told him. Head high, arms stiff, he marched the length of the hall, through the lesser folk sprawling on the floor in the sunlight, all the way to the tables where the thanes and warriors sat, until he stood before Thane Drakkor himself. There he proclaimed that he was Atheling Vork, son of Thane Kragthong of Spithfrith, son of as many successive forebears as he remembered, and he came in peace to this hall. In conclusion, he issued formal notice that Gark’s enemies would henceforth have him to look out for, also, at which a widespread titter was barely suppressed. With his red hair flaming bright above his skinny pale neck, he looked absurdly young to be playing the role he had assumed, and his voice remained relentlessly treble.

  “If he pours you a horn of mead, of course, you’re safe,” Twist had promised. “If he throws it in your face, you’re a dead man. If he tells you to go and eat… well, there’s still hope.”

  Drakkor glowered at Vork as if he had never seen him before, and then pointed with his dagger at the hearths and told him to go eat with the churls.

  As for Gath… “You want to announce yourself as thane of Krasnegar, lad? That’s suicide — his father died denying that claim. As son of Thane Rap, a faun half-man? As son of Thane Inosolan, a woman?”

  Gath bristled. He thought son of Rap Thaneslayer, and discarded that idea quickly. “As his kinsman, then? As the imperor’s messenger?”

  Twist shrugged his hump. “It would be safer that you not reveal yourself at all.”

  Gath assumed he meant the athelings’ exhibition matches. “I’m not afraid of a fight!”

  Twist smiled so wide that he drooled. “With the Covin? It will be sending watchers to the moot, you know. May even have one on Seadragon — I haven’t looked them over yet.”

  “You mean I’ve come all this way —”

  “And you want to go all that way back, don’t you? So you’ll stay just a water boy, and you won’t be going to the moot! Which would you rather be: Vork-son-of-Kragthong in Drakkor’s clutches, or Gath-son-of-Rap in Zinixo’s?” He cackled.

  The Covin was the danger. The Covin was the enemy, and for all Gath knew he might have already muddled up some plans of Dad’s with his meddling. The Covin might be the real reason why Mom and the imperor had decided not to come. And yet, although royal honors had never meant anything to Gath before, now that he was being denied them, they suddenly felt important for the first time in his life. Growling, he agreed that he would sit among the groundlings, for the moment.

  He slunk into the hall to watch York’s entrance and subsequent humiliation. He felt somewhat better after that, and went to join him at the spits for a slab of roast goat and some cheering up. A couple of Blood Wave’s crew spotted their two tyros and decided to fill them both with peasant beer. They were prepared to use force if necessary, but Gath was not in a mood to argue — he needed to assert his manhood, even if it was only by getting drunk. Events blurred very quickly after that. There was much roast goat and fresh black bread, and some singing, and buckets and buckets of green beer. There was a sort of a fight between Gath and a lanky youth from the thorp, but they were both far too blurred to do any damage. There was falling down and throwing up. There was helping to drag out the drunks to make room in the hall.

  There was waking up much later in the grass and going back inside again for more goat, and more green beer, and seeing different visiting thanes at the high table, and more useless windmilling fighting, over and over and over. The sun never set.

  * * *

  And in among all this insanity, there were moments of serious business.

  After Thane Trakrog departed, and before Thanes Jorvir and Griktor arrived, Drakkor went back down to the beach and hammered Gismak and Grablor into insensibility, one after the other. A captain must discipline his crew.

  * * *

  There were also moments of rapture, when the thane’s skald sang for the guests. In the hall Twist wore breeches like everybody else and his deformities were cruelly exposed. He was jeered at, had things thrown at him and tipped over him, but when he sat down and touched his harp and began to sing, then even the snoring stopped.

  It was impossible for that crumpled body to produce such sound or those tangled teeth to hurl such words, and yet the skald filled the hall with pearls and rubies of song.

  He sang of death and sorrowing. He sang of legendary heroes and great disasters. Most often he sang of Kalkor, Thane Drakkor’s father, former owner of this hall, sacker of cities. Gath thought the endless recitals of loot sounded very much like his own father’s shopping lists for the spring fleet, but fortunately he was never quite drunk enough to say so.

  * * *

  There were moments of muddled worrying. Twist’s news about the goblins was horrifying — Kadie, Kadie! Gath tried not to think about that, but there were hundreds of other things he should be worrying about, and most of the time he couldn’t keep a thought in his head for more than a few seconds before it drowned.

  Yes, he had accomplished more or less what he had set out to do, in that he had made contact with a Nordland sorcerer — and apparently Warlock Olybino’s proclamation had made his trip unnecessary anyway. The moot itself would not be crucial, if Twist would organize the other sorcerers. There must be others, many others. But was Twist going to cooperate? That was something Gath could not establish. The skald was rarely available for talk, and when he was. Gath’s teeth and tongue refused to cooperate with his brain.

  Probably a wise decision.

  * * *

  About the second or third time Gath heard him, Twist sang a different song. He sang of Thane Thermond, venerable, vulnerable, being challenged at the Nintor Moot. His sons had been delayed by a storm; who would save the noble thane from the challenge of virile Atheling Koddor?

  Then stepped forward Atheling Drakkor, exiled by a brother’s spite, landless sailor in another’s ship; eight and ten years only and untried with the ritual ax. He would be champion for the hard-pressed thane.

  The tale could not hold much drama after that, Gath thought. When two men entered the Place of Ravens for a Reckoning, one left his bones on the grass for ever. Had the loser been Thermond’s champion, then the old man would have had to go forward also and bow his neck for the victor’s stroke. In this case the outcome was fairly predictable, with Drakkor himself sitting there in full view. The story unfolded as Gath expected. Axes clashed, gore spurted, and the overambitious Koddor fell headless. Thus venerable Thermond was saved — end of tale.

  So that had been Future-Thane Drakkor’s first Reckoning? He had risked his life for a stranger? Interesting!

  * * *

  “I do not understand,” Vork complained, “how a man can be a sorcerer and look like that monster.”

  The boys were dragging their feet down to the shore. They had been persuaded that the best remedy for a hangover was to dip oneself totally in the Winter Ocean and then run all the way back up to the hall. Gath would have more faith in the proposed remedy if he could see anyone older than himself applying it. On the other hand, he was desperate enough to try anything. He felt as if he was walking on his eyeballs.

  “He’s a jotunn.”

  “So?”

  Gath didn’t want to talk at all. “How do they feel about sorcery? We feel, I mean.” When in Nordland be a jotunn.

  Vork sniffed. “Sailors are so frightened of bad luck that they won’t even talk about it. Warriors think it’s cowardice and cheating.”

  Exactly!

  They stopped simultaneously, toes at the water line. Very cold ripples ran up on the shingle.

  “So?” Gath said. “If Twist turns himself into a muscle-boy raider like his brother, he’s cheating. His friends would spurn him and flee in panic.”

  “Friends?” Vork shouted in his piercing treble. “They knock him down in the mud and spit on him!”

  Why could he not see it as Gath saw it? “But they are still his people. He could live as a king
in the Impire, but that isn’t what he wants. This is his home. This is his life. And he is his brother’s skald.”

  “What can that mean to a sorcerer?”

  “You haven’t been paying attention,” Gath said smugly.

  “Oh, no? See that piece of driftwood out there? I’ll race you to it.”

  “Right! Go!”

  Vork plunged into the icy water.

  Gath turned around and headed back to the hall.

  * * *

  At some point in that endless feast, he found himself sitting on the sun-warm grass outside the mead hall, talking with Twist.

  “Skalds?” he said. “Or women?”

  “Or priests.”

  “But never warriors, never sailors?” Gath peered carefully at the minstrel’s shining harp. He had no headache and he could only see one thing at a time, which meant he was drunk again. Idiot! Trouble was, when he wouldn’t drink up like a man, the sailors held his arms and poured the muck down his throat. Or turned him upside down and put his head in the bucket, which was worse. “Real men aren’t sorcerers?”

  “Never. Or rarely. You may be right in saying our father cheated that way. Don’t be saying it to anyone else, though.”

  “Is that why the Protocol…” The thought wandered away into the beery fog.

  Bodies snored in the grass all around.

  Twist chuckled. “So goes the legend. Because the jotnar would never use sorcery in battle, Emine agreed that no one else might use it against them, and the warden of the north was assigned to defend them from it.”

  Gath followed that idea around in his head, one word at a time, then nodded. The world rocked sickeningly. “But way back here in Nordland, who could tell who might be cheating?”

  “And no thane ever trusts another.”

  “So the skalds stay home and guard the thorps against sorcery?”

  “Purely defensive,” Twist agreed, amused by something.

  Gath lay back on the warm turf and closed his eyes. He put an arm across them to cut out the pink glare of the sun. That was better. “Who else knows this?” he muttered.

  “The thanes and the skalds. Nobody else at all. Not even the warlock of the north nowadays, I suspect.”

  “And your brother won your words for you by being champion for Thane Thermond?”

  “That was the price. I was thirteen. I was dying — the taller I grew, the worse my back curved. Sorcery saved me.”

  Without any hard evidence at all, Gath had come to know that this human ruin was his brother’s counsellor, the brains of the family partnership. Drakkor was only the muscle.

  “You will be going to Nintor, Twist?”

  “Of course. Every year the thanes meet at the Moot Stow on Nintor. The Reckonings are held at the Place of Ravens. But there is always another moot, every year, a secret moot”

  “The skalds?”

  “The sorcerers. They go to see fair play. They also hold a moot, a moot of their own, at the Commonplace.”

  “I have to come.”

  “It is too dangerous for you.”

  “Stuff that harp,” Gath muttered sleepily, and heard a chuckle. “I am coming.”

  There was another thought, something he must tell… Oh, yes. “This is going to be a war moot?”

  “The imperor has pulled back his legions from Guwush.”

  “The fake imperor.” Gath yawned mightily. “It’s a trap, of course.” The sun was pleasantly warm on his chest and limbs.

  “Perhaps it is, but no one knows about the fake imperor or the usurper. No one but sorcerers know that the Covin has overthrown the Four.”

  “Drakkor knows?”

  “I have told him. Doubtless most of the other thanes know also. But their followers do not.” Twist’s fingers stroked the strings and the harp sighed. Then it proclaimed a martial chord. Several apparently unconscious drunks sat up quickly and looked around.

  “After three thousand years,” he continued, “who will believe that the Protocol no longer operates? Drakkor has been preaching war for two moots now. How can he stop when the Impire is being so vulnerable? You cannot be arguing with a hungry bear!”

  Gath sighed as the wind sighed in the grass. “It is a trap!”

  “Perhaps it is. What sort of a trap, though? Have you worked that out. Little Atheling?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell me!”

  “I will tell the secret moot,” Gath said sleepily. Silence.

  4

  The longships had stopped coming. Only one spit held a goat and the hall was almost deserted. The villagers had returned to their wives and their labor. Down on the shore, Blood Wave’s crew readied her for departure.

  Gath was close to panic. He was going to be left behind! Twist was avoiding him apparently, and who could ever catch a sorcerer who did not want to be caught? Drakkor was unavailable to a lowly water boy. He haunted the thorp and the hall in misery. Once in a while a gang of sailors would catch him and fill him full of disgusting beer again, or match him up in a fight. He was sick of the drunkenness and foolery and juvenile games. There was a war on, and he was being excluded.

  Then he saw Twist lurching along the hall in an unusual hurry. Heedless of danger, Gath followed, right through into the private quarters, dark and mysterious and out of bounds. He caught up with the cripple just as he hurtled in through a door.

  “Raven Feast has rounded the head and Thane Kragthong is on board!” the skald cried.

  The little room was dim and stuffy. It was larger than Twist’s cottage, but stark and simple as befitted a jotunn’s chamber. The bed was made of plain boards covered by a worn fur. On it lay Drakkor, unshaven and haggard from days of unending feasting, and the blue of his eyes was circled by red. He had probably been asleep. In a fast reaction, he threw his goat’s-wool blanket over his companion and blinked up blearily at his brother. “I will be there.”

  Twist turned to go, and discovered Gath.

  Gath could tell that this was not the most appropriate setting for discussing business. The girl on the bed was invisible now, but she was certainly not Drakkor’s wife, who was out in the hall. She had also been much younger.

  “Thane?” Gath shouted.

  Twist rolled his eyes and stepped aside.

  The look he received almost melted Gath’s bones, but he stood his ground.

  Drakkor growled. “What the Evil do you want?”

  “To go to Nintor with you.”

  “It is too dangerous.” The thane rolled over on his side and put a thick arm over the shrouded girl.

  Twist tugged urgently at Gath’s wrist.

  “Since when has that mattered to a jotunn?”

  Drakkor tightened his embrace on the blanket, not turning to look at his visitors. “Jotunn? You? Go away, half-man!”

  If he was sober he would not be able to do this, Gath thought, trickling sweat. “Sir, I bear a message from the warlock of the north — and from my father the Thaneslayer.”

  The muscles in Drakkor’s back tensed like cables. “Brother… Turn him into something horrid!”

  “Then I ask Thane Kragthong?” Gath asked shrilly.

  “Go away!” Drakkor roared. The blanket jerked nervously.

  The grip on Gath’s arm tightened with superhuman power, digging into the muscle. He yelled in fury as he found himself being dragged away bodily by that flimsy runt.

  “Stop!” the thane said. He rolled over on his back and glared. “We carry no passengers to Nintor. You would row?”

  There were only four days left until the moot. If the wind was not favorable, that meant three days of hard rowing. God of Horrors! Gath hesitated, thought about Dad, and said stubbornly, “Aye, sir! I’ll row double watch if I have to.”

  Drakkor groaned. “Take him away, Skald. I’ll thump him later.”

  * * *

  The mead hall was packed as Raven Feast’s crew marched in. Gath sat on the floor amid the massed groundlings. Beside him, Vork hugged his knees and
watched with wide green eyes. His red hair seemed to be standing on end, and all his freckles showed.

  The leader was a hulking thane of middle years, scarred and battered. A pace behind him walked the passenger he had brought from Urgaxox, Vork’s father. In this land of giants, Kragthong no longer towered so tall, but there was not a belly in Gark to match his. It overhung his breeches like a thatched roof. His face was older and more careworn than Gath remembered, but his forked silver beard jutted forth arrogantly in the sunlight streaming through the great windows.

  Vork seemed to shrink down and down until only his eyes showed above his knees, like green pebbles.

  Smoke swirled from the fires. The visitors paraded along the hall. They came to a halt before Thane Drakkor at the high table. He was freshly shaven and clear-eyed, as if the feasting had never happened, young and jubilant. Even the wind seemed to hush expectantly.

  Thane Afgirk of Clam recited his honors and his ancestors. “Your foes are mine,” he concluded.

  “Safe haven and good sport, brother of Clam! You are welcome to this hall.” Drakkor tipped mead into a drinking horn and passed it across joyously. He filled another for himself. The two thanes drained them simultaneously. Drakkor waved his guest to a stool and sat down, ignoring the other visitor.

  Kragthong tugged his beard with two hands. Then he straightened and his great harsh voice boomed out. “I am Kragthong, Nordland ambassador to Dwanish, and I come in peace to this hall. Your enemies are mine. Thane.”

  “By law, all ambassadors are admitted.” Without looking up, Drakkor carved a slab of meat and handed it to Afgirk.

  Kragthong glanced around and then spoke out again, louder than ever. “I travel to Nintor on business, Thane.”