Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  Valsak found himself gone from the throneroom, in a space that was not a place. Yet the Dark Brother’s eyes were on him still, and the torment he had known in his interrogation as nothing beside what he felt now. It went on and on and on. In that torment, he took some little while to notice he was not alone.

  Next to him, twisting in that not-place, was Oldivor. Their eyes met. Valsak saw the satisfaction that filled the other’s face. So did the Dark Brother. Satisfaction was not why the castle lord was here. An instant later, his anguish matched Valsak’s again.

  They watched each other hurt a long, long time.

  The Decoy Duck

  I’ve done only three pieces of short fiction set in the Videssos universe, where things Byzantine meet things fantastic. “The Decoy Duck” is set about nine hundred years before the events described in The Misplaced Legion, at the time when the Empire of Videssos was at the peak of its power. The story originally appeared in After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien, a placement reflected in its closing line. It’s also influenced by the work of the late, great Poul Anderson, a man I was privileged to call my friend.

  * * *

  The Videssian dromon centipede-walked its oared way into Lygra Fjord. Something about it struck Skatval the Brisk as wrong, wrong. Wondering what, the Haloga chief used the palm of a horn-hard hand to shield eyes against morning sun as he stared out to sea.

  He reluctantly decided it was not the imperial banner itself, gold sunburst on blue, that fluttered from the top of the dromon’s mast. He had seen that banner before, had clashed with those who bore it, too often to suit him.

  Nor was it the twin suns the Videssians drew to help the warship see its proper path, though his own folk would have painted eyes instead. Coming from the far south, the Videssians naturally had more confidence in the sun than Halogai could give it. Hereabouts, in the ice and dark and hunger of winter, the sun seemed sometimes but a distant, fading memory. Not for the first time, Skatval wondered why the Empire of Videssos, which had so much, sought to swallow Halogaland and its unending dearth.

  But that thought led him away from the mark he had set for himself. He peered further, sought once more for strangeness, something small, something subtle . . .

  “By the gods,” he said softly, “it’s the very shadows.” The northern men, who had to contend with the wild seas and savage storms of the Bay of Haloga, always built their boats clinker-style, each plank overlapping the one below and pegs driven through both for surer strength. The planks on the dromon were set edge to edge, so its sides seemed indecently smooth—rather like the Videssians themselves, Skatval thought with a thin smile.

  The men he led could fill half a dozen war galleys. The arrogant dromon had already sailed past the inlets where four of them rested. Let the fightfire be kindled—and torches lay always to hand—and that brash captain would never hie back to his hot homeland. Skatval had but to say the word.

  The word went unsaid. For one thing, in the bow of the dromon stood a white-painted shield hung on a spearshaft, the Videssian sign of truce. For another, the dromon was alone. If he sank it and slew its sailors, a swarm would sally forth for vengeance. Stavrakios, the man who sat on the Empire’s throne, was very like a Haloga in that.

  The dromon halted perhaps a furlong from the end of the fjord. Skatval watched the loincloth-clad sailors (his lips twisted in a scornful smile as he imagined how they would fare in such garb here, more than a month either way from high summer) lowered a boat into the gray-blue water. Four men scrambled down a rope into the boat. The ragged way they worked the oars told him at once they were no sailors. Now the corners of his mouth turned down. What were they, then?

  As they moved out of the dromon’s shadow, the sun shone off their shaven pates. For a moment, Skatval simply accepted what he saw. Then he cursed, loud, long, and fierce. So the Videssians were sending another pack of priests to Halogaland, were they? Had they not yet learned the northern folk cared nothing for their god? Or was it that their Phaos sometimes demanded blood sacrifice?

  Skatval chewed on the new thought some little while, for it made the Videssian god more like those he venerated. But in the end he spat it out. He had seen imperials at worship. They gave their effete god hymns, not gore.

  With the boat gone, the dromon turned almost in its own length (there was oarwork worth respect) and made to the outlet of the fjord. Skatval frowned again. Not even the bloodless Videssians were in the habit of leaving priests behind to perish.

  Instead of beaching, the boat paused half a bowshot from shore. The blue-robed priests began to chant. One stood, looked up at the sun, and sketched a circle above his breast. Skatval knew that was a gesture of respect. The other priests raised their hands to the heavens. The chant went on. The standing blue-robe sketched the sun-circle again, then made a quick pass, and another, and another.

  A broad bridge of sunlight suddenly sprang from boat to beach. The priests swung knapsacks over their shoulders and strode across it as confidently as if they walked on dry land. When the last of them had crossed, the bridge vanished. The boat bobbed in the fjord, lonely and forgotten.

  So, Skatval thought, they are sorcerers. The magic, which likely awed any watching crofters, impressed him as well, but only so far: he would have thought more of it had it brought the boat in, too. Still, the Halogai also boasted wizards, though their craft was earthier, often bloodier, than this play with light itself. Skatval refused to be awed. He had no doubt that was what the blue-robes sought, else they simply would have rowed ashore.

  “Like to brag of themselves, do they?” he muttered. “I’ll choke their brags in their throats, by the gods.”

  He set hand on swordhilt and strode shorewards. Should he slay the blue-robes now, he wondered, or was that Stavrakios’ purpose, to seek to incite him and give the Empire excuse to turn loose its ships and soldiers? Videssos played a slipperier game of statecraft than most. Perhaps it was wiser to let the priests first commit some outrage, as they surely would, to justify their slaughter.

  The unwelcome newcomers saw him tramping down the track from the longhouse. As one, they turned his way. As one indeed, he thought. Videssian priests were like so many peas in a pod. Before he drew near enough to make out faces, he was sure what he would find. Some would be older, some younger, but all small and slight and swarthy by his standards.

  Three of the four priests fit the expected pattern. Even their ages were hard to judge, save by the grayness of their untrimmed beards: as much as their matching robes, their naked, gleaming skulls made them seem all the same.

  Perhaps because he foresaw uniformity, Skatval needed longer than he should have to note the fourth man out of the boat broke the mold. Robed he was like his companions, and shaven, but the beard that burgeoned on cheeks and chin was neither black nor gray, but rather a golden tangle that reached halfway down his chest. His face was square; his nose short; his eyes not dark, heavy-lidded, and clever but open, friendly, and the exact color of the waters of Lygra Fjord.

  Skatval’s firm step faltered. He tugged at his own beard, more neatly kept than that of the fourth priest but of the same shade. Here was something unlooked for. How had Videssos made a Haloga into a priest of Phaos? More to the point, what sort of weapon was he?

  All the priests had been praying since they left Merciless for the boat that had brought them to this inhospitable shore. But now Antilas, Nephon, and Tzoumas stood silent, watching the barbarian approach. They knew martyrdom might lie only moments away, knew their fate rested in Phaos’ hands alone, knew the good god would do with them as he willed.

  Kveldulf knew all those things, knew them as well as his brethren. Nevertheless, he recited the creed yet again: “We bless thee, Phaos, lord with the great and good mind, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.”

  “Your piety, as always, does you credit, Kveldulf,” Tzoumas said. Like all imperials, the old priest pronounced Kveldulf’s name as if
it were a proper Videssian appellation: Kveldoulphios. He had grown so used to hearing it thus that it was nearly as if he’d borne it that way since birth. Nearly.

  Not wishing to contradict his superior, he modestly lowered his eyes. He’d spoken Phaos’ creed not so much to beg favor from the good god as to anchor himself, to recall what he’d willed himself to become, in a world where he needed such anchor as much as a shipwrecked sailor needed a spar to support himself in a sea suddenly turned all topsy-turvy.

  Though he’d not set foot in Halogaland for twenty years and more, everything here smote him with a familiarity the stronger for being so unexpected: the way the land sloped sharply up from the sea; the grim gray of bare rock; the air’s cool salt tang; the dark cloaks of arrow-straight fir and pine that covered the shoulders of the hills; the turf walls of the chief’s longhouse and the way those walls turned in toward each other to accommodate the shape of the roof, which was not in fact a roof by original intention, but rather an upside-down boat outworn for any other use. He’d passed his boyhood in just such a longhouse.

  But he was a boy no more. Taken back to the Empire as a prize of war, he’d grown to manhood—grown to priesthood—in its great cities, in golden Skopentzana and in the mighty imperial capital, Videssos the city itself. Now he saw through the eyes of a man who better knew a different world from what he had taken for granted as a child.

  “They’re so poor,” he whispered. The green fields were brave with growing barley and beans, but pitifully narrow. And the crops, by Videssian standards, could not help being scanty. Under the smiling southern sun, some favored provinces brought in two harvests a year. Here in the north, getting one was by no means guaranteed. The kine were small, the pigs scrawny; only the sheep seemed as fine and woolly as he remembered. They had need for fine wool here, wool to ward against winter.

  Even the longhouse was at the same time a match for his memories and less than he had looked for it to be. This chief was richer than Kveldulf’s father had dreamed of being; his home was bigger and stronger than that from which Kveldulf had fled, nose running and throat raw from smoke, as the imperials set it ablaze. Yet beside a score of homes, palaces, temples in Skopentzana, beside a score of scores in Videssos the city, it was but a hovel, and a filthy hovel at that.

  The chief himself still stumped toward the priests. He was a big, broad-shouldered man with the same pale hair, fair skin, and light eyes as Kveldulf’s. The massive gold brooch that closed his cloak also declared his rank. But his baggy wool trousers had dirt-stained knees, perhaps from stooping in the fields but as likely from the earthen floor of the longhouse. Recalling his father’s holding burning over his head made Kveldulf notice the chief’s red-tracked eyes, the soot forever ground into the lines of his forehead: the Halogai knew of chimneys, but in winter they often chose not to let heat flee through them.

  The chief paused about ten feet in front of the priests, spent a full minute surveying them. Then he said, “Why came you here, where you know your kind are not welcome?” His deep, slow voice, the sonorous, mouth-filling words he spoke, made Kveldulf shiver. Not since boyhood had he heard anyone save himself speak the pure Haloga tongue; he had taught it to his comrades here, but they gave it back with a staccato Videssian intonation.

  Just the sound of the chief’s voice set Kveldulf’s heart crying to reply, but that was not his proper place. Modestly, he cast his eyes to the ground as Tzoumas, senior and most holy of the four, answered in the northern speech: “We come to tell you of the good god Phaos, the lord with the great and good mind, whom you must worship for the sake of your souls.”

  “Here is a new thing,” the chief said, raising straw-colored eyebrows. Suddenly, he shifted into Videssian: “Not a few of us know your language, but few southern men have bothered learning ours.”

  Behind Kveldulf, Nephon nudged Antilas, whispered, “Few of Videssos would waste their time on this barbarous jargon.” Antilas grunted agreement. The Haloga chief could not have heard him. Kveldulf frowned anyhow, though Nephon was far from wrong; only a direct order from the patriarch had produced even three to learn the northern tongue and the ways of the Halogai. Most Videssians assumed anyone unwilling to take on their own ways was not worth saving.

  The chief went on, still in Videssian, “I dare say this decoy duck taught it to you.” His gaze swung to Kveldulf and he returned to his birthspeech as he asked, “Who are you, and how came you among the southrons?”

  “By your leave, holy sir?” Kveldulf murmured to Tzoumas, who dipped his head in assent. Only then did Kveldulf speak directly to the Haloga: “I am Kveldulf, a priest of Phaos like any other.”

  “Not like any other, by the gods,” the chief said. “And Kveldulf what? Are you a slave or a woman, that you have neither ekename nor father’s name to set beside your own?” He thumped his chest with a big fist. “Me, I am Skatval the Brisk, otherwise Skatval Raud’s son.”

  “Honor to you and yours, Brisk Skatval,” Kveldulf said, giving the chief proper greeting. “I am—Kveldulf. It is enough. If you like, I am a slave, but a willing slave to the good god, as are all his priests. We have no other titles, and need none.”

  “You—own yourself a slave?” Skatval’s sword slid from its sheath. “And you would fain enslave the free folk of Halogaland?”

  “To the good god, yes.” Kveldulf knew death walked close. Among themselves, the Halogai kept no slaves. Videssos did. Kveldulf had been a slave of the most ordinary sort until his fervent love for the god of whom he learned within the Empire persuaded his master, a pious man himself, to free him to serve Phaos. He unflinchingly met Skatval’s glare. “Slay me if you must, sir. I shall not flee, nor fight. But while I live, I shall preach.”

  The Haloga chief began to bring up his bright blade. Then, all at once, he stopped, threw back his head, and roared laughter till it echoed from the hills. “Preach as you will, where you will, nithing of a priest. Let us see how many northern men would willingly shackle themselves forever to anything, even a god.”

  Kveldulf felt angry heat rise from his throat to the top of his head. With his pale, almost transparent skin, he knew how visible his rage had to be. He did not care. Of themselves, his hands curled into clumsy, unpracticed fists. He took a step toward Skatval. “Hold!” Tzoumas said sharply.

  Skatval laughed still, threw aside his sword. “Let him come, Videssian. Perhaps I can pound sense into his shaven head, if it will enter there in no other way.”

  “Hold, holy sir,” Tzoumas told Kveldulf again, and waited for him to obey before turning back to Skatval. To the chief, he said, “Pick up your weapon, sir, for in the battle about to be joined, you will find Kveldulf well armed.”

  “Well armed? With what?” Skatval jeered.

  “With words,” Tzoumas answered. Skatval suddenly stopped smiling.

  Kveldulf preached in a pasture, a clump of cow dung close by his sandals. From everything Skatval knew of Videssians, that in itself would have been plenty to put them off stride. But Kveldulf noticed no more than any of the chief’s smallholders might have. And too many of those smallholders to suit Skatval stood in the field to listen.

  Skatval watched from the edge of the woods that lay by the pasture. He had called Kveldulf a woman for bearing an unadorned name. Now, as if in revenge for that taunt, women flocked to hear the Haloga unaccountably turned Videssian priest. When he thought to be so, Skatval was just enough. Much as he despised Kveldulf, he could not deny the blue-robe made a fine figure of a man, save for his naked skull. And even that, repulsive as it still seemed on the Videssian clerics, might be reckoned but an exotic novelty on one who was in every other way a perfect northerner. By the sighs from the womenfolk, they reckoned it so, which only annoyed Skatval the more.

  Among those womenfolk was his own daughter Skjaldvor; he saw her bright gold hair in the second row of the crowd around Kveldulf. He rumbled something discontented, down deep in his throat. If Skjaldvor took this southron nonsense seriously, how co
uld he hope to rid himself of Kveldulf when the time came for that? He rumbled again. His daughter should have been wed two years ago, maybe three or four, but he’d indulged, indeed been flattered by, her wish to stay in his own longhouse. Now he wondered what sort of price he would have to pay for that indulgence.

  He could all but hear his own stern, bloodthirsty gods laughing at him. They knew one always paid for being soft. He scowled. Would they willingly let themselves be supplanted, just for the sake of teaching him a lesson he already had by heart? They might. Halogai who went after vengeance pursued it for its own sake, without counting coins to see if it was worth the cost.

  The summer breeze, so mild as to befool a man who did not know better into thinking such fine days would last forever, blew Kveldulf’s words to Skatval’s ears. The priest had a fine, mellow voice, a man’s voice, and was no mean speaker: to northern directness he married a more sophisticated Videssian style, as if he were holding up ideas in his hands and examining them from all sides.

  He paused. His listeners, who should have been making the most of the short summer season instead of standing around listening to sweet-tasting nonsense, broke into applause. Skatval saw Skjaldvor’s hands meet each other, saw in profile her bright eyes aimed straight at Kveldulf, her mouth wide and smiling.

  He began to worry in earnest.

  After some days’ preaching, Kveldulf began to worry in earnest. The Halogai, once his people—still his people if blood counted as well as dwelling, as it surely did—flocked to hear him. They listened to him with greater, more serious attention than a crowd of Videssians would have granted; every imperial fancied himself a theologian, and wanted to argue every shade of meaning in Phaos’ holy scriptures. The Halogai listened respectfully; they nodded soberly; they declined to convert.