Besant gave Gerin a resentful stare. He was a tubby, sloppy-looking man of about fifty in homespun colorless save for dirt and stains here and there. "I shall do as you say, lord prince," he mumbled. "The ghosts have been bad of late, though."
"Feed them more generously, then, or throw more wood on the nightfires," Gerin said. "You've no need to hide in your houses from an hour before sunset to an hour past dawn."
Besant nodded but still looked unhappy. The trouble was, he and Gerin needed each other. Without the serfs, Gerin and his vassal barons would starve. That much Besant Big-Belly knew. But without the barons, the little villages of farmers would be at the mercy of Trokmoi and bandits: peasants with pitchforks and scythes could not stand against chariots and bronze armor and spears and swords. The headman did his best to ignore that half of the bargain.
Gerin said, "Remember, I'll be listening to hear when you blow the horn come evening." He waited for Besant to nod again, then walked off to see how the village fared.
The gods willing, he thought, the harvest would be good. Wheat for bread, oats for horses and oatmeal, barley for ale, rye for variety, beans, peas, squashes: all grew well under the warm sun. So did row on row of turnips and parsnips, cabbage and kale, lettuce and spinach. Gardens held vetch, onions, melde, radishes, garlic, and medicinal herbs like henbane.
Some fields stood vacant, the grass there lengthening for haymaking. Cattle and sheep grazed all the way out to the edge of the trees in others. A couple of lambs butted heads. "They might as well be barons," Gerin murmured to himself.
The peasants were hard at it as usual: weeding like Besant, repairing wooden fences to keep the animals where they belonged, unbaling straw to repair a leaky roof—all the myriad tasks that kept the village going. Gerin stopped to talk with a few of the serfs. Most seemed content enough. As overlords went, he was a mild one, and they knew it.
He spent more time in the village than he'd intended; the sun was already sinking toward the treetops when he headed back to Fox Keep. No, Besant won't blow the horn early tonight, not with me here so long, he thought. We'll have to see about tomorrow.
* * *
When he returned to the castle, the cooks were full of praise for the way Otes son of Engelers had fixed half a dozen pots. The Fox nodded approvingly. The large sale the jeweler had made to Fand (or rather, to Van) hadn't kept him from doing the other half of his job. On seeing Otes himself, Gerin invited him to stay for supper and pass the night in the great hall. By the way he grinned and promptly accepted, the neat little man had been expecting that.
In the great hall, Tassilo was fitting a new string to his lute and plucking at it to put it in proper tune. Duren watched him in pop-eyed fascination. "I want to learn to do that, Papa!" he said.
"Maybe you will one day," Gerin said. Stored away somewhere was a lute he'd had as a boy. He'd never been much good with it, but who could say what his son might accomplish?
After supper, Tassilo showed what he could do. "In honor of my host," he said, "I shall give you some of the song of Gerin and the dreadful night when all the moons turned full together." He struck a plangent chord from the lute and began.
Gerin, who had lived through that dreadful night five years before, recognized little of it from the minstrel's description. Much of that had to do with the way Tassilo composed his song. He didn't create it afresh from nothing; that would have overtaxed even the wits of Lekapenos, the great Sithonian epic poet.
Instead, like Lekapenos, Tassilo put his song together from stock bits and pieces of older ones. Some of those were just for the sake of sound and meter; the Fox quickly got used to hearing himself called "gallant Gerin" every time his name was mentioned. It saved Tassilo, or any other poet, the trouble of having to come up with a new epithet every time he was mentioned in the story.
And some of the pieces of old songs were ones Gerin had heard before, and which didn't perfectly fit the tale Tassilo was telling now. The bits about battling the Trokmoi went back to his boyhood, and likely to his grandfather's boyhood as well. But that too was part of the convention. More depended on the way the minstrel fit the pieces together than on what those pieces were.
All the same, Gerin leaned over to Van and said, "One thing I remember that Tassilo isn't saying anything about is how bloody frightened I was."
"Ah, but you're not a person to him, not really," Van replied. "You're gallant Gerin the hero, and how could gallant Gerin be afraid, even with every werebeast in the world trying to tear his throat out?"
"At the time, it was easy," Gerin said, which won a laugh from Van. He'd been through the werenight with Gerin. "Bold Van," Tassilo called him, which was true enough, but he hadn't been immune to fear, either.
And yet, the rest of Tassilo's audience ate up the song. Drago the Bear, who'd gone through his own terrors that night, pounded on the table and cheered to hear how Gerin had surmounted his: it might not have been true, but it sounded good. Duren hung on Tassilo's every word, long after the time he should have been asleep in bed.
Even the Trokmoi, whose fellows had been on the point of putting an end to Gerin when the chaos of the werenight saved him, listened avidly to the tale of their people's discomfiture. Well-turned phrases and songs of battle were enough to gladden them, even if they came out on the losing side.
Tassilo paused to drink ale. Diviciacus said to Gerin, "Give me your answer now, Fox, dear. I've not the patience to wait for morning."
Gerin sighed. "It must be no."
"I thought as much," the Trokmê said. "Yes is simple, but no needs disguises. You'll be after regretting it."
"So will your chief, if he quarrels with me," the Fox answered. "Tell him as much." Diviciacus glared but nodded.
When Gerin, who was yawning himself, tried to pick up Duren and carry him off to bed, his son yelled and cried enough to make the Fox give it up as a bad job. If Duren wanted to fall asleep in the great hall listening to songs, he'd let him get away with it this once. Gerin yawned again. He was tired, whether Duren was or not. With a wave to Tassilo, he headed for his bedchamber.
What with Fand and Van in the next room, the noise up there proved almost as loud as what the minstrel made, and even more distracting. Gerin tossed and turned and grumbled and, just when he finally was on the point of dropping off, got bitten on the cheek by a mosquito. He mashed the bug, but that woke him up again. He lay there muttering to himself until at last he did fall asleep.
Because of that, the sun was a quarter of the way up the sky when he came back down to the great hall. Van, who was just finishing a bowl of porridge, laughed at him: "See the slugabed!"
"I'd have gotten to sleep sooner if someone I know hadn't been making such a racket next door," Gerin said pointedly.
Van laughed louder. "Make any excuse you like. You outslept your guests, no matter what. All three lots of them are long gone."
"They want to get in as much travel as they can while the sun's in the sky. I'd do the same in their boots." Gerin looked around. "Where's Duren?"
"I thought he was with you, Captain," Van said. "Didn't you take him up to bed the way you usually do?"
"No, he wanted to listen to Tassilo some more." Gerin dipped up a bowl of porridge from the pot over the fire, raised it to his mouth. After he swallowed, he said, "He's probably out in the courtyard, making mischief."
In the courtyard he found Drago the Bear pouring a bucket of well water over the head of Rihwin the Fox. Both of them looked as if they'd seen the bottoms of their drinking jacks too many times the night before.
"No, I've not seen the boy all morning," Drago said when Gerin asked him.
"Nor I," the dripping Rihwin said. He added, "If he made as much noise as small boys are in the habit of doing, I'd remember seeing him . . . painfully." His eyes were tracked with red. Yes, he'd hurt himself last night.
Gerin frowned. "That's—odd." He raised his voice. "Duren!" He put two fingers in his mouth, let out a long, piercing whistle that made Rihwin and Drago flinch.
His son knew he was supposed to come no matter what when he heard that call. He also wasn't supposed to go by himself too far from Castle Fox to hear it. Wolves and longtooths and other wild beasts roamed the woods. So, sometimes, did wild men.
But Duren did not come. Now Gerin began to worry. Maybe, he thought, the boy had gone off to the peasant village. He'd done that alone once or twice, and got his backside heated for it. But often a boy needed a lot of such heatings before he got the idea. Gerin remembered he had, when he was small.
He walked over to the village, ready to thunder like Dyaus when he found his son. But no one there had seen Duren, either. A cold wind of dread in his belly, Gerin went back to Castle Fox. He sent men out in all directions, beating the bushes and calling Duren's name. They came back scratched by thorns and stung by wasps, but without the boy.
Duren was missing.
II
Gerin paced between the benches in the great hall, making Rihwin and Van and Drago move out of the way. "One of those three must have snatched him," he said: "Diviciacus or Tassilo or Otes. I can't believe Duren would go wandering off where we couldn't find him, not of his own accord."
"If you're right, Captain, we've eaten up a lot of the day looking around here," Van said.
"I know," Gerin answered unhappily. "I'll go out and send others in chariots as well, even so; if Dyaus and the other gods are kind, one of us will catch up with our—guests." He spat the last word. Guest-friendship was sacred; those who violated it could expect a long, unhappy time in the afterlife. Unfortunately, though, fear of that didn't paralyze all rogues.
"Who'd want to steal a little boy?" Drago the Bear growled. His big hands moved in the air as if closing round a neck.
Gerin's more agile wits had already started pursuing that one. "Diviciacus might, to give Adiatunnus a hold on me," he said. "I don't think Adiatunnus would have ordered it—who could guess ahead of time if the chance would come up?—but I don't think he'd turn down a gift like that if it fell into his lap."
"Duren might give him a hold for now, but he'd get nothing but grief from you later," Van said.
"Aye, but since I turned him down for a joint move on Aragis, he's liable to think he'd get only grief from me anyhow," the Fox answered, thinking, He's liable to be right, too. Aloud, he went on, "Speaking of Aragis, Otes the jeweler came from his lands. And Aragis might not turn down a hold on me, either."
"You're right there, too," Drago said, making more choking motions.
"You're leaving out Tassilo," Van said.
"I know." Gerin kicked aside a dog-gnawed bone. "I can't think of any reason he'd want to harm me."
"I can," Rihwin the Fox said.
"Can you indeed?" Gerin said, surprised. "What is it?"
Rihwin coughed; his smoothly handsome face went a couple of shades pinker than usual. "You'll recall, lord, that when last you made the acquaintance of this Tassilo, I was in the process of, ah, disqualifying myself from marrying the fair Elise. I hadn't tasted wine in too long, you understand."
"Disgracing yourself is more like it," Van said, blunt as usual. Gloriously drunk, Rihwin had stood on his head on a table at Ricolf the Red's and kicked his legs in the air . . . while wearing a southern-style toga and no drawers.
He coughed again. "Perhaps your word is more accurate, friend Van, though not calculated to make me feel better about the incident or myself. Be that as it may, I resume: Elise having found you no more to her taste, lord Gerin, than her father did me, she might possibly have engaged the services of this minstrel to rape away the boy for her to raise."
Gerin bit down on that like a man whose teeth closed on a worm in an apple. Ever since Elise left him, he'd done his best not to think about her; whenever he did, it hurt. He had no idea where in the northlands she was, whether she was still with the horse doctor with whom she'd gone away, or even whether she still lived. But what Rihwin said made enough sense that he had to ask himself those questions now.
Slowly, he answered, "Aye, you're right, worse luck; that could be so." He plucked at his beard as he weighed odds. "I still think the Trokmoi are likeliest to have stolen Duren, so Van and I will go southwest after them. Which way did Tassilo fare?"
"West, toward the holding of Schild Stoutstaff, or that's where he told the gate crew he was heading," Drago answered.
Gerin grunted. If Tassilo had Duren with him, he might well have lied about his chosen direction. Or he might not have. Schild had been the leading vassal to Wolfar of the Axe. He wasn't a deadly foe to Gerin, as Wolfar had been, but he was no great friend, either. Though he'd acknowledged the Fox his suzerain after Gerin killed Wolfar, he forgot that whenever convenient. He might shelter Tassilo, or at least grant him safe passage.
"All right, Rihwin," Gerin said. "You ride west to Schild's border, and past it if his guards give you leave. If they don't—" He paused for effect. "Tell them they, and their overlord, will have cause to regret it."
Rihwin nodded. "As you say."
"Now, Otes," Gerin said.
Again, Drago answered: "He said he was heading east along the Emperor's Highway, to see if Hagop son of Hovan had tinker's work for him. He didn't think he'd sell Hagop much in the way of jewelry: 'skinflint' was the word he used, I think."
"For Hagop, it's a good one," Gerin said judiciously. "All right, you go after him, then."
"I'll do that, lord," Drago said, and strode out of the great hall. Gerin was as sure as if his eyes could follow that Drago was heading for the stables to hitch his team to his chariot, and that he'd ride out after Otes the minute the job was done. To Drago, the world was a simple place. His liege lord had given him an order, so he would follow it. Gerin sometimes wished he couldn't see all the complications in the world around him, either.
Van said, "You'll want me to ride with you, eh, Captain? We'll need a driver as well, if we're to take on Diviciacus and his friends on even terms."
"You're right on both counts," Gerin said. He thought about adding another chariot and three-man team of warriors, too, but decided against it. Van was worth a couple of ordinary men in a fight, and the Fox did not denigrate his own skill with his hands. And Raffo Redblade, who'd been driving for them for years, hadn't earned his ekename by running from fights. The Fox added, "And we'll send Widin Simrin's son south to ask what Aragis knows. Van, find him—he'll be in the courtyard somewhere—and get him moving, too."
The decision made, Gerin took his armor down from the wall and put it on: bronze greaves first, then leather cuirass faced with scales of bronze, and last of all a plain pot of a helmet. None of it was polished; none of it looked the least bit fancy—the Fox left that to Van. But his own gear was sound. It did what he wanted it to do: it kept edged and pointed metal from splitting his flesh. As far as he was concerned, nothing else mattered.
He slung his quiver over his shoulder, took down his bow, and then grabbed his shield. That was a yard-wide disk of leather and wood, with bronze edging to keep swordstrokes from chewing it up.
Most Elabonian warriors had gear much like the Fox's. Some men went in for gold or silver ornamentation, but he wanted nothing of the sort: curlicues and inlays could catch and hold a point, while rich armor made a man a special target on the battlefield.
With his outlandish armor, Van of the Strong Arm was always a target on the battlefield, but no one yet had been able to strip his crested helm and two-piece corselet from him. Along with his spear, he carried a sword, a mace, and several daggers. He was also a fine archer, but did not use the bow in combat, affecting to despise slaying foes from afar as unmanly.
"Foolishness," Gerin said, as he had many times before. "As long as you're alive and the other fellow isn't, nothing else matters. You get no points for style, not in war you don't."
Van brandished his spear. "Captain, that's never been a problem." His grin showed only a couple of broken teeth, more evidence (as if more were needed) he was more dangerous with weapons in hand than anyone he'd run up
against.
Practical as usual, Gerin went into the kitchens and filled a leather sack with twice-baked bread that would keep indefinitely (and that needed someone with good teeth to eat it) and strips of smoked mutton even tougher than the bread. If he had to fight from the chariot, the sack would go over the side. If he didn't, he and Van and Raffo could travel for a few days without worrying about supplies.
Gerin shouldered the bag and carried it out to the stables. Raffo, a gangling young man with pimples along the margin of his beard, looked up from hitching the horses to either side of the chariot shaft. "Be good to get out on the road, lord Gerin," he said, getting the animals into the double yoke and securing them to the shaft with straps that ran around the front of their necks.
"It would be better if we were going out for a different reason," Gerin said heavily. Raffo's face fell; he'd forgotten that. The Fox had given up on expecting tact from his men. They were, he sometimes thought with something approaching despair, only a couple of steps more civilized than the Trokmoi. Improving that was a matter for generations, not just years; even keeping them from falling back into barbarism often seemed none too easy.
He stowed his shield on the brackets mounted on the inside of the car. It made the side wall higher. Van walked into the stables then. His place in the chariot was on the right side. He set his shield into its stowage place, too, and grunted approvingly when he saw the sack of supplies.
"That's good," he said. "Now we'll just need to buy a fowl from the peasants if we camp out in the open, or bleed out our prey if we go hunting: have to give the ghosts something, after all."
"Aye." Gerin's voice was abstracted. "The chase won't be easy. Diviciacus and his friends have half a day's start on us, and more than one road they can choose to go back to Adiatunnus—and we don't even know they have my boy." He wanted to scream in rage and fear. Instead, he grew more quiet and withdrawn than ever; he was not one to show worry on the outside.
"Only one way to find out," Van said.
"True, true." Gerin turned to Raffo. "Are you done harnessing the beasts?" By way of answer, the young driver vaulted into the car. The Fox clapped him on the back. "Good. Let's travel."
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