Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  “Stand aside,” he said. Neither men nor women moved. “Are you so many sparrows, serving to save the cuckoo’s spawn Stavrakios has set among you?”

  “He is a holy man, a good man,” said Kalmar Sverre’s son, a fine crofter and not the worst of men himself.

  “I do not deny it,” Skatval said, which caused more than one of Kveldulf’s guards to stare at him in surprise. He went on, “That makes him the greater danger to all that is ours. Ask him yourself, if you believe it not of me.” His voice roughened. “Go on, ask him.”

  Though none of the converts gave way, they did look back to Kveldulf. The blue-robe stared past them to Skatval. Unafraid, he sketched the sun-sign, then set right fist over heart in formal Videssian military salute. He said, “Skatval speaks the truth. Having taken the lord with the great and good mind into your hearts, you cannot remain what you once were. His truth will melt the falsehoods in your spirit as the summer sun slays the snows of Halogaland.”

  “By his own words he brands himself our foe,” Skatval said. “Would you let him make you into milksop southrons?”

  “Kveldulf is no milksop,” Kalmar said stoutly. He held his knife low, ready to stab up in the way of those who know how to fight with short blades. But a few people left the converts’ circle and stood apart from it, watching to see what would happen next.

  Kveldulf said, “I would not see brother spill brother’s blood. Stand aside; I told Skatval I would not flee him. Phaos will receive me into his palace; the world to come is finer than the one in which we live now. If your chief would send me to it, I will go.”

  “But, holy sir—” Kalmar protested. Kveldulf shook his head. The son of Sverre muttered a word that ran round the ring of converts. Skatval heard it, too: “Fey. He is fey.” Kalmar looked back to Kveldulf once more. Again Kveldulf shook his head. Tears brightening his eyes, Kalmar lowered the knife to his side and stepped away. One by one, the other converts moved to right or left, until no one stood between Kveldulf and Skatval.

  The chief spoke to the men behind him: “We’ll take him to the trees over there and tie him.”

  “No need for that,” Kveldulf said. He had gone pale, but his voice stayed steady. “I said I would not flee, and meant it. Do as you deem you must, and have done.”

  “ ’Twere easier the other way, priest,” Skatval said doubtfully.

  “No. I need not be bound to show I would gladly lay down my life for the lord with the great and good mind; I act by my own will.” Kveldulf paused for one long breath. “A favor once I am dead, though, if you would.”

  “If I may, without hurt to my own,” Skatval said.

  “Pack my head in salt, as if it were a mackerel set by for the winter, and give it into the hands of the next Videssian shipmaster who enters Lygra Fjord. Tell him the tale and bid him take it—and me—back to the temples, that the prelates there might learn of my labors for the good god’s sake.”

  Skatval stroked his beard as he pondered. Stavrakios might shape the return of such a relic into a pretext for war, but then Stavrakios was a man who seldom needed pretext if he aimed to fight. The chief nodded. “It shall be as you say—my word on it.”

  “Strike, then.” Kveldulf raised hands and eyes to the sky. “We bless thee, Phaos, lord with the great and good mind, watchful beforehand that—”

  Skatval struck with all the strength that was in him, to give Kveldulf as quick an end as he might. The spearhead tore out through the back of the blue robe. The priest prayed on as he crumpled. Skatval’s followers shoved spears into him as he lay on the green grass. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He writhed, jerked, was still.

  Wearily, Skatval turned to the converts who had watched the killing. “It is over,” he said. “Go to your homes; go to your work. You see whose gods are stronger. Would you worship one who lets those who love him die like a slaughtered sow? This Phaos is all very well for Videssians, who serve nobles and Avtokrator like slaves. Give me a god who girds his own to go down fighting, as a Haloga should.” He locked eyes with Kalmar Sverre’s son. “Or say you otherwise?”

  Kalmar met his gaze without flinching, as Kveldulf had before him. In his own good time, he looked away to Kveldulf’s corpse. He sighed. “No, Skatval; it is so.”

  Skatval sighed, too, somber still but satisfied. A low murmur rose from the rest of the converts when they heard Kalmar acknowledge the might of the old Haloga gods. They, too, took a long look at Kveldulf, lying in a pool of his own blood. A couple of women hesitantly signed themselves with the sun-circle. Most, though, began to drift out of the field where they had worshiped. Skatval did not smile, not outside where it showed. By this time next year, his folk’s brief fling with Phaos would be as forgotten as a new song sung for a summer but afterwards set aside.

  Pleased with the way the event had turned, he said to a couple of his followers, “Vasa, Hoel, take him by the heels and haul him to the hole he dug. But hack off his head before you throw him in; a promise is a promise.”

  “Aye, Skatval,” they said together, as respectfully as they had ever spoken to him: almost as respectfully as if he were Stavrakios of Videssos, sole Avtokrator of a mighty empire, not Skatval the Brisk of Halogaland, one among threescore squabbling chiefs. The feeling of power, strong and sweet as wine from the south, puffed out his chest and put pride in his step as he strode up the path to his longhouse.

  But when Skjaldvor spied the bright blood that reddened his spearshaft, she ran weeping through the garden and into the woods. He stared after her, scratching his head. Then he plunged the iron point of the spear into the ground several times to clean it, wiping it dry with a scrap of cloth so it would not rust.

  “Try and understand women,” he grumbled. He leaned the spear against the turf wall of the longhouse, opened the door, nodded to Ulvhild his wife. “Well, I’m back,” he said.

  The Seventh Chapter

  This tale is also set in the Videssos universe. Like a lot of tales set in that universe, this one is historical based. Its model actually took place in medieval England, but the milieus—or at least this aspect of them—are similar enough to make transposition easy . . . and hair-splitting is much more a Videssian preoccupation than one from the England of long ago.

  * * *

  The snow was falling harder now. Kassianos’ mule, a good stubborn beast, kept slogging forward until it came to a drift that reached its belly. Then it stopped, looking reproachfully back over its shoulder at the priest.

  “Oh, very well,” he said, as if it could understand. “This must be as Phos wills. That town the herder spoke of can’t be far ahead. We’ll lay over in—what did he call it?—Develtos till the weather gets better. Are you satisfied, beast?”

  The mule snorted and pressed ahead. Maybe it did understand, Kassianos thought. He had done enough talking at it, this past month on the road. He loved to talk, and had not had many people to talk to. Back in Videssos the city, his clerical colleagues told him he was mad to set out for Opsikion so late in the year. He hadn’t listened; that wasn’t nearly so much fun as talking.

  “Unfortunately, they were right,” he said. This time, the mule paid him no attention. It had reached the same conclusion a long time ago.

  The wind howled out of the north. Kassianos drew his blue robe more tightly about himself, not that that did much good. Because the road from the capital of the Empire of Opsikion ran south of the Paristrian mountains, he had assumed they would shield him from the worst of the weather. Maybe they did. If so, though, the provinces on the other side of the mountains had winters straight from the ice of Skotos’ hell.

  Where was he? For that matter, where was the road? When it ran between leaf-bare trees, it had been easy enough to follow. Now, in more open country, the pesky thing had disappeared. In better weather, that would only have been a nuisance (in better weather, Kassianos reminded himself, it wouldn’t have happened). In this blizzard, it was becoming serious. If he went by Develtos, he might freeze befor
e he could find shelter.

  He tugged on the reins. The mule positively scowled at him: what was he doing, halting in the cold middle of nowhere? “I need to find the town,” he explained. The mule did not look convinced.

  He paused a moment in thought. He had never been to Develtos, had nothing from it with him. That made worthless most of the simpler spells of finding he knew. He thought of one that might serve, then promptly rejected it: it involved keeping a candle lit for half an hour straight. “Not bloody likely, I’m afraid,” he said.

  He thought some more, then laughed out loud. “As inelegant an application of the law of similarity as ever there was,” he declared, “but it will serve. Like does call to like.”

  He dismounted, tied the mule’s reins to a bush so it would not wander off while he was incanting. Then, after suitable prayers and passes, he undid his robe and pissed—quickly, because it was very cold.

  His urine did not just form a puddle between his feet. Instead, impelled by his magic, it drew a streaming line in the snow toward more like itself, and thus, indirectly, toward the people who made it.

  “That way, eh?” Kassianos said, eyeing the direction of the line. “I might have known the wind would make me drift south of where I should be.” He climbed back onto his mule, urged it forward. It went eagerly, as if it sensed he knew where he was going again.

  Sure enough, not a quarter of an hour later the priest saw the walls of Develtos looming tall and dark through the driving snow. He had to ride around a fair part of the circuit before he came to a gate. It was closed and barred. He shouted. Nothing happened. He shouted again, louder.

  After a couple of minutes, a peephole opened. “Who ye be?” the man inside called, his accent rustic. “Show yerself to me and give me your name.”

  “I am Kassianos, eastbound from Videssos the city,” the priest answered. He rode a couple of steps closer, lowered his hood so the guard could see not only his blue robe but also his shaven head. “May I have shelter before I am too far gone to need it?”

  He did not hear anyone moving to unlatch the gate. Instead, the sentry asked sharply, “Just the one of you there?”

  “Only myself. In Phos’ holy name I swear it.” Kassianos understood the gate guard’s caution. Winter could easily make a bandit band desperate enough to try to take a walled town, and falling snow gave them the chance to approach unobserved. A quick rush once the gate was open, and who could say what horrors would follow?

  But Kassianos must have convinced the guardsman. “We’ll have you inside in a minute, holy sir.” The fellow’s voice grew muffled as he turned his face away from the peephole. “Come on, Phostis, Evagrios, give me a hand with this bloody bar.” Kassianos heard it scrape against the iron-faced timbers of the gate.

  One of the valves swung inward. The priest dug his heels into the mule’s flanks. It trotted into Develtos. The sentries closed the gate after it, shoved the bar back into place. “Thank you, gentlemen,” Kassianos said sincerely.

  “Aye, you’re about this far from being a snowman, aren’t you, holy sir?” said the guard who had been at the peephole. Now Kassianos could see more of him than a suspicious eyeball: he was short and lean, with a knitted wool cap on his head and a sheepskin jacket closed tight over a chainmail shirt. His bow was a hunter’s weapon, not a soldier’s. He was, in other words, a typical small-town guardsman.

  “Want I should take you to Branes’ tavern, holy sir, let you warm yourself up outside and in?” asked one of the other guards. But for a back-and-breast of boiled leather and a light spear in place of a bow, he was as like the first as two peas in a pod. He glanced toward the man, who was evidently his superior. “Is it all right, Tzitas?”

  “Aye, go on, Phostis, we’ll manage here.” Tzitas showed his teeth in a knowing grin. “Just don’t spend too much time warming yourself up in there.”

  “Wouldn’t think of it,” Phostis said righteously.

  “No, you wouldn’t; you’d do it,” said Evagrios, who’d been quiet till then. Tzitas snorted.

  Phostis sent them both a rude gesture. He turned back to the priest. “You come with me, holy sir. Pay these scoffers no mind.” He started off down the street. His boots left pockmarks in the snow. Still on muleback, Kassianos followed.

  The tavern was less than a hundred yards away. (Nothing in Develtos, come to that, looked to be more than a quarter mile from anything else. The town barely rated a wall.) In that short journey, though, Phostis asked Kassianos about Videssos the city four different times, and told him twice of some distant cousin who had gone there to seek his fortune. “He must have found it, too,” Phostis said wistfully, “for he never came back no more.”

  He might have starved trying, Kassianos thought, but the priest was too kind to say that out loud. Videssos’ capital drew the restless and ambitious from all over the Empire, and in such fast company not all could flourish.

  Even without Phostis’, “Here we are, holy sir,” Kassianos could have guessed which building was Branes’ from the number of horses and donkeys tied up in front of it. He found space at the rail for his mule, then went in after the sentry.

  He shut the door behind him so none of the blessed heat inside would escape. A few quick steps brought him to the fireplace. He sighed in pure animal pleasure as the warmth began driving the ice from his bones. When he put a hand to his face, he discovered he could feel the tip of his nose again. He’d almost forgotten he still owned it.

  After roasting a bit longer in front of the flames, Kassianos felt restored enough to find a stool at a table close by. A barmaid came over, looked him up and down. “What’ll it be?” she asked, matter-of-fact as if he were carpenter rather than priest.

  “Hot red wine, spiced with cinnamon.”

  She nodded, saucily ran her hand over his shaved pate. “That’ll do it for you, right enough.” Her hips worked as she walked back to the tapman with his order; she looked over her shoulder at the priest, as if to make sure he was watching her.

  His blood heated with a warmth that had nothing to do with the blaze crackling in the fireplace. He willed himself to take no notice of that new heat. Celibacy went with Phos’ blue robe. He frowned a little. Even the most shameless tavern wenches knew that. Clerics were men, too, and might forget their vows, but he still found an overture as blatant as this girl’s startling. Even in the jaded capital, a lady of easy virtue would have been more discreet. The same should have gone double for this back-country town.

  The barmaid returned with his steaming mug. As he fumbled in his beltpouch for coppers to pay the score, she told him, “You want to warm up the parts fire and wine don’t reach, you let me know.” Before he could answer, someone called to her from a table halfway across the room. She hurried off, but again smiled back at Kassianos as she went.

  Before he lifted the cup to his lips, he raised his hands to heaven and intoned the usual Videssian prayer before food or drink: “We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind, by thy grace our protector, watchful beforehand that the great test of life may be decided in our favor.” Then he spat in the rushes to show his rejection of Skotos. At last he drank. The cinnamon nipped his tongue like a playful lover. The figure of speech would not have occurred to him a moment before. Now it seemed only too appropriate.

  When his mug was empty, he raised a finger. The girl hurried over. “Another, please,” he said, setting more coppers on the table.

  She scooped them up. “For some silver . . .” She paused expectantly.

  “My vows do not allow me carnal union. What makes you think I take them lightly?” he asked. He kept his voice mild, but his eyes seized and held hers. He had overawed unrepentant clerics in the ecclesiastical courts of the capital; focusing his forensic talents on a chit of a barmaid reminded him of smashing some small crawling insect with an anvil. But she had roused his curiosity, if not his manhood.

  “The monks hereabouts like me plenty well,” she sniffed; she sounded offended he did not
find her attractive. “And since you’re a man from Videssos the city itself” (news traveled fast, Kassianos thought, unsurprised), “I reckoned you’d surely be freer yet.”

  Along with its famed riches, the capital also had a reputation in the provinces as a den of iniquity. Sometimes, Kassianos knew, it was deserved. But not in this . . . “You are mistaken,” the priest replied. “The monks like you well, you say?”

  The girl’s eyes showed she suddenly realized the hole she had dug for herself. “I’m not the only one,” she said hastily. “There’s a good many women they favor here in town, most of ’em a lot more than me.”

  She contradicted herself, Kassianos noted, but never mind that now. “Are there indeed?” he said, letting some iron come into his voice. “Perhaps you will be so good as to give me their names?”

  “No. Why should I?” She had spirit; she could still defy him.

  He dropped the anvil. “Because I am Kassianos, nomophylax—chief counsel, you might say—to the most holy ecumenical Patriarch Tarasios, prelate of Videssos the city and Videssos the Empire. I was summoned to Opsikion to deal with a troublesome case of false doctrine there, but I begin to think the good god Phos directed me here instead. Now speak to me further of these monks.”

  The barmaid fled instead. Eyes followed her from all over the taproom, then turned to Kassianos. The big man whose place was behind the bar slowly ambled over to his table. As if by chance, he held a stout club in his right fist. “Don’t know what you said to little Laskara, blue-robe,” he said casually, “but she didn’t much like it.”

  “And I, friend, did not much like her seeking to lead me astray from my vows, and liked even less her telling me the monks hereabouts are accustomed to ignoring theirs,” Kassianos answered. “I do not think the most holy Tarasios, Phos bless him, would like that, either. Perhaps if I root out the evil, it will never have to come to his attention.”