Prince of the North

by Turtledove, Harry

  Gerin did some thinking. With his wits midnight-slow, it wasn’t easy. At last, though, he said, “Here, I have it.” He rose creakily and poked around under a tree until he found a long, dry stick. Then he went over to the Sibyl and tapped her with it until she jerked awake and sat up.

  “How dare you lay hands on—” she began. Then she realized Gerin hadn’t laid hands on her. Faint firelight and the beams of all the moons but Elleb (which hadn’t yet risen) showed her confusion. “I see,” she said at last, inclining her head to Gerin. “Your friend wants his blanket back, not so? And you found a way to let me know without touching me. I wonder if I would have done as well.” She unwrapped herself and stood. “Here you are, Van of the Strong Arm.”

  As Van came to strip off his armor and claim the blanket, Selatre stepped back to make sure they didn’t bump even by accident. She looked away till he was settled. Then, instead of taking Gerin’s blanket at once, she said, “Let me walk off into the woods for a moment first.”

  She didn’t go far because of the ghosts (whose wails seemed to Gerin to get worse while she was away), and came back as fast as she’d promised, but Van was snoring by the time she returned. He’d said Selatre snored, too, but the Fox doubted she came anywhere close to the thunderous buzz he produced.

  The former Sibyl wrapped herself in Gerin’s blanket and wiggled around on the ground, trying to find a comfortable position. She kept squirming for some time, while Gerin walked back and forth waking up. Finally Selatre said, “I can’t sleep right now.”

  “Nothing too out-of-the-way about that, I suppose, not when you lay in your bed through the day and the night and into the next day again,” Gerin said.

  “I can still hardly believe that.” Selatre looked up into the sky. After a moment, Gerin realized she was studying the moons. When she spoke again, her voice held wonder: “Tiwaz is closer to Math than he should be, and has sped farther past golden Nothos. What you say there must be so, which argues for the truth of the rest of your tale.”

  “Lady, I told you no lies, nor did Van.” The Fox was nettled; here he’d risked his life to save her, and she still wondered if he was nothing more than a kidnapper? That irritation came out in the sneer with which he said, “I trust you don’t find yourself polluted by mere talk with a man?”

  She flinched as if he’d slapped her. “By no means,” she answered tonelessly. “However—” She turned her back on him and started to wrap his blanket around her once more.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, scraping a shallow trench in the ground with the hobnailed sole of his sandal. “I shouldn’t have said that. Talk all you care to; I’ll listen.”

  He wondered if she’d pay any attention to him; he would not have blamed her for ignoring him after that gibe. But, slowly, she turned back to him, eyeing him with the same grave attention she’d given the moon not long before. “You will forgive me when I say that (knowing little of men in general and barons in particular) you strike me as unusual?” she asked.

  His laugh held little mirth. “Since everyone in the northlands says as much, why should you be any different?”

  “I meant no insult,” Selatre said. “The word of you that came to Ikos after Biton laid his hand on me and made me Sibyl held no reproach: indeed, you were on the whole well thought of for trying to hold to the standards of the Empire of Elabon even after Elabon abandoned the northlands.”

  “Nice to know someone somewhere had some notion of what I was about,” Gerin said. “More than my vassals do, I think.” With a deliberate effort of will, he forced his thoughts from that gloomy track and changed the subject. “How did it happen that Biton chose you through whom to speak?”

  “I’d known he might since I became a woman,” Selatre answered. “For though I was normal in every other way, my courses never began, which is a sign of the farseeing one’s notice in the villages round his shrine. But Biton’s mouth on earth had served him so long I never dreamt he might one day call her to himself at last—or that his eye would fall on me to take her place.”

  “How did you know you were the one he wanted?” Gerin asked.

  “He came to me in a dream.” Selatre’s eyes went far away, looking through the Fox rather than at him. Slowly, she continued, “It was the realest dream, the most lifelike, you can imagine. The god—touched me. I may say no more. I’ve never felt anything like that dream for realness, save, very much the opposite way, with horror rather than delight, the evil dreams I’ve had of late.”

  Gerin nodded. “I’ve had those myself. They’re worse than any I’ve known before, that’s the truth.” He wondered if she experienced them even more vividly because of her intimate contact with Biton and things of the spirit generally. Not knowing any way to find an answer to that, he chose a different question: “Did you go and proclaim yourself at the temple, then?”

  “No. I would have, but the very next day the priests came to my village instead. Biton had sent some of them dreams of me, and they sought me out.”

  “Ah,” the Fox said. Had the dream come to Selatre alone, he might have thought it sprang from her imagination, but if the priests also knew the farseeing god had chosen her to succeed the ancient Sibyl, not much room was left to doubt Biton had sent it.

  Endlessly curious, the Fox found a chance to put a question he’d never expected to be able to ask: “What is it like when Biton speaks through you? What do you feel or think or whatever the word is?”

  “It’s not—like—anything else I know,” Selatre answered. “When the mantic fit takes hold of me, of course, I know nothing at all; I always have to ask the priest, if one is there with me, what my response was. But while the god’s power is coming over me, before he takes me fully—” She didn’t go on, not with words, but she shivered, and her eyes were full of longing. At last she added, “And now no more, never again. No more.”

  Her voice wept. Suddenly Gerin believed in his belly that she would sooner have died than be rescued at the cost of losing that link with Biton; it struck him as almost like losing a lover or a husband. But with the temple cast down and monsters loose on the northlands, the link was surely lost anyhow. Had he not believed that, he would have drowned in guilt.

  Maybe Selatre conceded the point, however reluctantly, for she said, “And now that it is to be no more, what, lord Gerin, do you see life holding for me at Fox Keep? What would you have me do?”

  Gerin had his mouth open to reply before he realized he had no idea what to say. What place had he, had the keep, for Biton’s former Sibyl? Serving woman, apt to be pawed by his vassals and his guests? Could she return to peasant life after time spent with the god? He doubted it.

  And then, just as he was about to confess ignorance, inspiration struck. “Do you have your letters?” he asked.

  “No—Biton spoke to me direct, not through scribblings,” she answered. “But I always thought I might like to learn.”

  “I’d be glad to teach you,” he said. “One of the things that goes into keeping up the standards of the Empire of Elabon, as you called it, is having a grasp of time and place that goes farther than what you—or I, or anyone—can keep in your head. The more people who read and write, the more who can get that wide knowledge civilization needs. I teach as many folk as I can.”

  “As may be,” Selatre said. “But what has it to do with whatever my life at Castle Fox would become?”

  “I have a fair store of books at the keep,” Gerin answered. “Oh, any bibliophile south of the Kirs would laugh himself silly to hear it called such, but I do have several dozen scrolls and codices, and I get new ones—old ones other folk don’t care about, most of the time—now and again. I had in mind for you, if you think it would suit, to take charge of them, learn what’s in them and where it can be found, make new copies as they’re needed or if someone asks for such: not likely, I admit, in the state the northlands are in, but stranger things have happened. What say you?”

  She was silent a long time, so long he began to f
ear he’d somehow insulted her after all, even if he’d just intended to find her a place where she could be useful and one that might keep her from some of what she would surely see as indignities. Then, at last, she said, “I am not ashamed to tell you I must apologize, lord Gerin.”

  “Why?” he asked, startled. “For what?”

  “In spite of everything you’ve said, you have to understand I had trouble fully crediting your reasons for snatching me from Ikos,” she answered. “Once you had me back at Fox Keep, who could guess what you might do with me? In truth, I could guess, and my guesses frightened me.” Her laugh came shaky, but it was a laugh. “And instead of putting me in your bed, you’d put me in your library. Do you wonder that I needed a moment before I found a way to answer you?”

  “Oh,” Gerin said. “Put that way, no.” He too took a while groping for words before he went on, “Lady, enough women are willing that forcing one who’s not has always struck me as more trouble than it’s worth. But folk who have wits and can use them are precious as the tin that hardens copper to bronze. I judge you may be one of that sort. If you are, by Dyaus, I’ll use you.”

  “Fair and more than fair,” she said, then seemed to surprise herself with a yawn. “Perhaps I shall sleep more, after all. My heart is easier than I thought it could be.”

  “I’m glad of that.” Gerin said as she wrapped herself in his blanket again. She seemed to have forgotten the creatures still issuing from the cave under Biton’s temple. He remembered, but forbore to remind her. Let her rest easy while she could.

  The free peasant village whose men had hunted Gerin and Van through the night on their way to Ikos was a sorry place when they and Selatre rode up to it at midmorning the next day. Half the houses had fallen down in the earthquake; several bodies lay sprawled and stiff on the grass, awaiting burial.

  “If they’d built stronger, they’d have come through better,” Van said, unwilling to waste much sympathy on folk who would have robbed and maybe murdered him.

  “Maybe so,” Gerin said, “but maybe not, too. Stronger houses might still have fallen—look at Biton’s temple. And if they did, they’d have crushed whoever was inside them. This way, a lot of people probably managed to crawl out of the wreckage.”

  “Mm, something to that, maybe,” Van admitted. “All the same, I won’t be sorry to see this place behind me.” He started to urge the horses up from a walk to a trot.

  “No, wait,” Gerin said, which made the outlander grunt in surprise and send him a disbelieving look. He explained: “The lady there has but the one linen dress, which is all very well for prophesying in but not what you’d want to wear day in and day out. I was thinking we might stop and buy another here, something of sturdy wool that would do until we got back to Castle Fox.”

  “Ah. There’s sense to you after all. There usually is, but this time I wondered.” Van reined in.

  Several of the villagers were in the fields; earthquake or no, tragedies or no, the endless routine of tillage had to go on. The women and children and few men who stayed by the houses swarmed toward the travelers’ wagon. “Noble sirs, spare us such aid in our misfortunes as you can give,” a woman cried. Others said the same thing in different words.

  The Fox stared down his nose at them. “By Dyaus, you’re better disposed to us now than you were when you came after us in the night to take our armor and swords.”

  “And mace,” Van added, hefting the viciously spiked weapon in question. If the peasants had any thoughts of trying to attack now, the blood-red reflections of the sun off those bronze spikes did a good job of dissuading them.

  The older man who’d sold the travelers a hen spoke for his people: “Lords, we all have to live as best we can, so I shan’t go grizzling out I’m-sorries, though I expect you wish the five hells would take us. But would you see us cast down like this?”

  “You don’t have it as bad as some,” Gerin said: “The temple at Ikos crashed in ruins yesterday.” The peasants wailed, some in genuine horror and distress, others, Gerin judged, in fear that, with the temple ruined, no one would ever again use the road from the Elabon Way to Ikos. That was, he thought, a good guess. He went on, “In aid of which, I present to you the lady Selatre, who was till yesterday the Sibyl at Ikos, and whom we rescued from the wreckage of the place.”

  The villagers gasped and exclaimed all over again. The Fox got down from the wagon to let Selatre descend without—the gods forfend!—touching him; Van shifted on the seat to make her way out easy. The peasants stared at her and muttered among themselves. At last one of them called to her, “Lady, though the temple be fallen, why did you not stay and wait for its repair?”

  Selatre cast down her eyes and did not answer. Gerin looked for some gentle way to break the news of the eruption of the monsters from the caves below the fane. While he was looking, Van, who minced few words, said, “If she’d stayed, she’d have been eaten. The same is liable to happen to the lot of you in the next few days, so you’d better listen to what we have to say.”

  He and Gerin, as was their way, took turns telling the tale of what had happened back at Ikos. When they were through, the fellow from whom they’d bought the chicken, who seemed to be a village spokesman, said, “If you didn’t have the Sibyl with you, I’d reckon you were makin’ up the tale to pay us back with a fright for wanting to lift the bronze off you.”

  “And since the lady is here, what do you believe?” Gerin demanded in no small exasperation. “You’ll find out soon enough whether we lie, I can tell you that. You’ve made a point of getting arms and armor, however you do it. When those creatures come, you’ll need them. Don’t leave them sitting wherever you’ve got them hidden; wear the mail, and take the spears and swords out into the fields with you.”

  “Take bows, too,” Van said. “These monsters aren’t what you’d call clever, from the little we saw of ’em. They don’t know arrows. Every one you kill from long range is one you won’t have to fight up close. I’d say they’re stronger and faster than people, and they have nasty teeth.”

  The details the Fox and Van gave were enough to begin to convince the villagers they weren’t just trying to frighten them. “Maybe we’ll do as you say,” the old man said after looking over his comrades.

  “Do whatever you bloody well please,” Gerin said. “If you don’t care about your necks, don’t expect me to do your worrying for you. All I’d like to do before I get out of here is buy a proper wool dress for the lady. I’ll pay silver for it, too, though the gods alone know why I’m dealing justly with folk who aimed to deal unjustly with me.”

  When he said “silver,” three or four women ran into their houses—those that still stood—and brought out dresses. None of them seemed to the Fox to stand out from the others; he turned to Selatre. She felt of them and examined the stitching with the air of a woman who had done plenty of her own spinning and weaving and sewing. Gerin remembered she had been a peasant before she was Sibyl: she knew of such things.

  “This one,” she said at last.

  The woman who’d produced it tried to set a price more or less equal to its weight in silver. Gerin, who parted with precious metal reluctantly at best, let out a loud, scornful laugh. “We don’t have to buy here,” he reminded her. “Other villages must have seamstresses who’ve not been stricken mad.” After that, she quickly got more reasonable; he ended up buying the dress with only a slight wince.

  “Have you also a pair of drawers you might sell?” Selatre asked.

  The woman shook her head. “Don’t wear ’em but in winter, to help keep my backside warm.” Selatre shrugged; likely it had been the same where she grew up, too.

  “Do you want to put the dress on here, where you’ll have more in the way of privacy?” Gerin asked her.

  “I’d not thought of that,” she said. “Thank you for doing it for me.” She ducked into one of the peasant huts, soon returning wearing the wool dress and with the linen one under her arm. Some of the aura of the Sibyl’s ca
ve left her with the change of clothes; she seemed more intimately a part of the world around her, not so much a waif cast adrift by circumstance. Maybe she felt that, too; she sighed as she stepped around Gerin to stow the linen dress in the wagon. “It’s as if I’m putting away part of my past.”

  “The gods willing, you have long years left ahead of you,” Gerin answered. He meant it as no more than a polite commonplace, but it set him wondering. With monsters not only loose on the world but emerging from the ruins of Biton’s temple, who could judge the will of the gods?

  Van spoke to the villagers: “Remember what we told you, now. How sorry you’ll be in a few days depends on whether you listen to us or not. You take no notice today, you won’t have the chance to be sorry and wish you’d paid heed.”

  “And the lot of you, you’re just driving away and leaving the trouble behind your wheels,” said the older peasant who spoke for the peasants.

  He had some reason to sound bitter. Peasants stayed with their land; a journey to the next village was something strange and unusual for them. But Gerin said, “If what I fear is true, you’ll just see the creatures before us; there may well be enough to torment all the northlands.”

  He did not convince the peasant, who said, “Aye, but you’re a lord; you can hide behind your stone walls.” He gestured to the buildings of the village, some of them fallen and even those still standing none too strong. “Look at the forts we have.”

  To that the Fox found no good reply. Once Selatre was aboard the wagon, he climbed in, too. Van clucked to the horses and flicked the reins. The animals snorted and began to walk. The wagon rolled out of the peasant village.

  When they’d gone a couple of furlongs, Selatre said, “The man back there was right. He and his have no way to shelter against the creatures that come forth against them.”

  “I know,” Gerin answered sadly. “I have nothing I can do about it, though. Did I stay to fight, I’d die, and so would they, and so I’d do them no good, and myself only harm.”