Prince of the North

by Turtledove, Harry

  “They don’t have to keep men and women apart,” Gerin observed.

  “No?” Selatre sounded surprised. Her mouth twisted. “It would be messy.”

  “It can be,” Gerin agreed. “You’re apt to be dry then, too. But” —he smiled a lopsided smile— “there are compensations. I didn’t want to seem as if I were forcing myself on you this first time. You’re finding out about so many new things so fast, I thought I shouldn’t burden you with one more. The gods willing, we have plenty of time.”

  “I think I am very lucky here.” Selatre snuggled closer still. “I may have said that before, too—eight or ten times.” She gave him a look that said, What are you going to make of that?

  He knew what he wanted to make of it, and was hoping he could rise to the occasion once more, when someone came running up the hall toward the bedchamber. He scowled; it was too late at night for anyone to bother him without excellent reason. Then the fellow outside shouted, “Lord Gerin, there are monsters loose in Besant’s village!”

  “Oh, a pox!” Gerin cried, and sprang out of bed. “I’m coming!” He scrambled into tunic and trousers, buckled on his sandals and grabbed his sword belt, and unbarred the door. Selatre barely had time to throw a blanket over her nakedness.

  Gerin hurried downstairs, where his armor, with that of his vassals, hung from pegs on the side walls of the great hall. He got into his corselet, jammed his bronze pot of a helm onto his head, and put his shield on his right arm. Tonight he’d make do without his greaves. He snatched up his bow and a full quiver of arrows.

  Van had already armed himself. “Come on, Captain,” he said impatiently. “I’ve missed good fighting to wait for you.”

  “You must have been down here, to have got into your gear so fast,” Gerin said.

  “Aye, so I was, drinking ale, rolling the dice with a few of the lads—you know how it goes. When the drawbridge thumped down, I figured somebody’d gone and pissed in the porridge pot, and sure enough, in came this screaming serf, babbling of monsters. I sent one of the cooks upstairs for you, while those of us who were down here got weapons and went out to fight.” With that, he trotted for the door himself, the Fox at his heels.

  At the gate, one of the men there handed Gerin a blazing torch. “Against the ghosts, lord prince,” he bawled. Gerin was grateful for his quick thinking, but felt overburdened as he pounded toward Besant Big-Belly’s village.

  Even with the torch, the night spirits assailed him as soon as he got outside the keep. Dark of night was their time, their element; they sent a chilling blast of hate and resentment down on a mortal who presumed to enter it without better apotropaic than fire alone.

  He set his teeth and ran on. Beside him, Van muttered oaths, or perhaps prayers, in a language he did not recognize. When those had no effect, the outlander shouted, “Be still, you cursed soulsuckers!” If any living man could awe the ghosts, Van would have been the one to do it. But no living man could.

  Fortunately, Besant’s village lay only a couple of furlongs from Fox Keep. Before the spirits could find all the chinks in the armor of Gerin’s soul and slip cold mental fingers in to drive him mad, he was among the wattle-and-daub huts of the serfs. They’d given the ghosts the usual gift of sunset blood, and so were not haunted through the night. But things fiercer than phantoms assailed them now.

  A man lay sprawled in the street. His blood darkened the dirt on which he’d fallen. His linen tunic was rucked up; monsters had been feeding on his legs and hindquarters before the warriors came to drive them off.

  Gerin threw down his bow. In the dim light, shooting was useless. Math’s crescent, almost brushed the horizon, and even pale Nothos’ fatter crescent higher in the western sky, made distances seem to shift and waver, as if in a dream. His sword snaked free. This would have to be close-quarters work.

  Screams from inside a hut with its door flung open told of a monster inside. Peering over the edge of his shield, Gerin ran in. The darkness was all but absolute, but his ears told him of the struggle there. Roaring, the monster turned from the serf it had been attacking to meet him.

  He thrust at it with his sword. He couldn’t have done more than pink it, for its cries redoubled. Crash! Something wet splashed in the Fox’s face. The monster was staggering, though—the serf, with great presence of mind, had hit it over the head with a water jar. The Fox stepped close, stabbed again and again and again. The monster stumbled, recovered, fell.

  “Dyaus bless you, lord prince,” the serf and his wife cried in the same breath.

  “And you, for the help you gave,” he answered as he turned and rushed back out into the street. No time now for polite conversation.

  Fighting the monsters was not like fighting human foes. That had both advantages and disadvantages. As Gerin had noted before, the creatures fought as individuals, not as part of a larger group. In the confused brawling in the darkness, though, his own men were hardly more organized. And the creatures neither cared anything for loot nor felt any shame at running away if they found themselves in danger they could escape by no other means. Full of notions about glory and honor and courage, Trokmoi would have held their ground and let themselves be killed where they stood.

  Gerin caught the reek from a monster’s body—a thicker, meatier smell than came from a man, no matter how long unwashed—and threw up his shield before the creature, just another shadow in the night, closed with him. He almost dropped the shield in surprise when a sword slammed against it.

  The monster gave him the first unmistakable words he’d heard from one of their throats: “Die, man!” They were in the Trokmê tongue, and snarled rather than spoken, but he had no trouble understanding them.

  “Die yourself,” he answered in the same language. The monster had no shield, no armor, and no skill at swordplay to speak of. But it was very quick and very strong. When it beat aside his thrust, the blow almost knocked the sword from his hand.

  He wondered if it could see better in the night than he could. After it and its ancestors had spent so many generations in a troglodytic life, that seemed likely. And, though it was very awkward with its sword, something let it thwart his strokes again and again.

  “Here, Captain, I’m coming!” Van shouted. His heavy footfalls got closer fast.

  The monster, though, did not wait to be attacked by two at once. It turned and scampered away toward the woods, faster than an armored man could hope to follow. The fighting died away not long after that, with the rest of the creatures either down or fled. Some of Gerin’s troopers had been clawed or bitten, but none of them was badly hurt.

  Besant Big-Belly sought out the Fox. The serfs in his village hadn’t been so lucky. As lamentations and moans of pain rose into the night, the headman said, “We’ve three dead, lord prince, and several more, men and women both, who won’t be able to work for some while. Dyaus and the other gods only know how we’re to bring in enough crops to meet your dues come fall.” He wrung his hands in anxiety.

  It was, Gerin thought with a flash of contempt, utterly characteristic of him to worry about the dues first and people only afterwards. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, “If I see the people here are making an honest effort, I won’t hold them to blame for falling a bit short of what they might have done otherwise.”

  “You’re kind, lord prince,” Besant cried, seizing Gerin’s hand and pressing it to his lips. The Fox snatched it back. He suspected the headman would use his generosity as an excuse to try to slack off before the harvest or cheat him afterwards, but he figured he had a decent chance of getting the better of Besant at that game.

  “Lord prince?” A hesitant touch on his arm: it was the serf in whose house he’d fought. “I want to thank you, lord prince. Weren’t for you, reckon that hideous thing would’ve et Arabel or me or maybe the both of us.”

  “Pruanz is right.” the woman beside the peasant said. “Thank you.”

  “Can’t have my villagers eaten,” Gerin said gravely. “They never work
as well afterwards.”

  Rihwin would have smiled at the joke, or at least recognized that it was one. It flew past Pruanz and Arabel, a clean miss. “Words, they’re cheap,” Pruanz said. “Want to give you something better, show we really mean what we say.”

  “Pruanz is right,” Arabel said. “You come back with me to the house, I’ll make you feel as good as I know how.” Even in darkness, he saw her twitch her hips at him.

  “Lord prince, she’s lively,” Pruanz said. “You’ll like what she does.”

  Gerin looked from one of them to the other. They meant it. He sighed. He’d taken his pleasure with peasant women a good many times, but he didn’t feel like it now, not with Selatre waiting for him back at the keep. As gently as he could, he said, “I don’t want to take your wife from you, Pruanz. I was just doing as a liege lord should, and I have a lady of my own.”

  Pruanz didn’t answer, but Arabel did, indignantly: “Well! I like that! What does she have that I don’t?” She rubbed herself against the Fox. By the feel of her, she did indeed possess all female prerequisites.

  He was embarrassed enough to wish he’d left her and her husband in the hut to be devoured. He managed to free his arm from Arabel and said to Pruanz, “The best way for the two of you to show you’re glad you’re alive is to bed each other.”

  Arabel let out a loud, scornful sniff. “Well! Maybe I should leave you to your fancy lady, lord prince, though I don’t suppose she gets much use out of you, neither.”

  “Arabel!” Pruanz hissed. “That’s no way to talk to him what saved us.”

  “And who saved him, smashing a jug over that horrible thing’s head?” she retorted. “I expect that means you saved me, too.” She all but dragged her husband back toward their hut. Gerin suspected his suggestion was about to be fulfilled, even if he’d given it to the wrong one of the pair.

  He gathered up his troopers. They didn’t have torches for the walk back to Fox Keep, but the ghosts were fairly quiet. Why not? he thought as he neared the drawbridge—the night spirits were no doubt battening on the new gift of blood they’d just received from the dead peasants and monsters.

  Some of the warriors went off to bed right away. Others paused in the great hall for a jack of ale—or several jacks of ale—before they slept. After Gerin had put his armor and the bow he’d recovered back on their pegs, Van planted an elbow in his ribs, hard enough to make him stagger. “Fox, that’s twice now lately you’ve turned it down when you had the chance to take some,” he said. “You must be getting old.”

  “Oh, you heard that, did you?” Gerin looked up his nose at his taller friend, who stood there chuckling. “If you want to get much older, you’d be wise to tend to your own affairs and leave mine—or the lack of them—to me.”

  “Affairs, forsooth.” Van drained his drinking jack, poured it full, drained it again. Then he headed for the stairs, a fixed expression on his face. For his sake, Gerin hoped Fand was in, or could be cajoled into, the mood. If she wasn’t, or couldn’t, she’d throw things.

  “That’s the closest they’ve come to here,” Drago the Bear said, yawning. “I don’t like it, not even a little bit.” By his matter-of-fact tone, he might have been talking of a hot, sticky summer’s day.

  “I don’t like it, either,” Gerin answered. “I’m stretched far too wide—seems that’s all I say lately. Men and cars off in Schild’s holding, more of them down in the south fighting Bevon and his bastard boys—”

  “They were born in wedlock, far as I know,” said. Drago, who could sometimes get the letter and miss the spirit.

  “They’re bastards all the same,” Gerin said. “Lining up with the Trokmoi is bad enough, but anyone who lines up with the monsters deserves whatever happens to him. I intend to happen to Bevon and Bevonis and Bevion, but while I’m dealing with them, I can’t be dealing with Adiatunnus and his monster friends. And if my men can’t push Bevon off the Elabon Way, and if Aragis’ troopers fail too, what then? I can’t see anything—except us losing the war, I mean.”

  “Never happen,” Drago said, and fell asleep at the table, his head in his hands.

  Gerin wished he had his vassal’s confidence—and naïveté. He knew only too well how easy losing the war would be; his nimble imagination, usually an asset, betrayed him with images of blood and defeat and treachery. So many ways things could go wrong. What he had trouble coming up with was ways they could go right.

  He emptied his own drinking jack and went upstairs himself. He opened the door to his bedchamber as quietly as he could, expecting Selatre to be asleep. But he found the lamp lit and her sitting up in bed waiting for him. She wasn’t spending the time idly, either; she’d gone down the hall to the library and fetched back a codex to read until he returned. She put it down and said, “Biton and the other gods be praised that you’re all right. Every time you go out to fight now—”

  “Not a scratch,” he said, turning to bar the door. “We hurt the monsters worse than they hurt the village, so that’s—well, not all right, but better than it might have been.” He didn’t want to talk about the skirmish; all he wanted to do was forget it. “What do you have there?”

  She flipped back to the first leaf of parchment. “On the Motions of the Moons, by one Volatin of Elabon. It was the first volume I saw in the library, the reason being that you left it out on the table there instead of returning it to its proper niche.” She fixed him with the severe look of a librarian whose sense of order had been transgressed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said; rather to his surprise, he found himself meaning it. “So you’re trying Volatin, are you? What do you make of him?”

  “Not much, I’m afraid,” she admitted. “Endless numbers and curious signs you didn’t teach me and other obscurities and oddments. What do they all mean?”

  “They mean that if I’d looked through his book five years ago I’d have known the werenight was coming, for he showed it beyond doubt in those columns of numbers. But I just thought of the book as a curiosity I’d brought back from the City of Elabon, and so it sat idle and useless on my shelf.” He scowled in self-reproach.

  “What could you have done about the werenight had you known of it?” Selatre asked.

  “Given that I was traveling when it happened, probably nothing,” he said. “But it’s made me pay close attention to the phases of the moons ever since. Ten—no, eleven—days from now, Math will be full, the day after that Elleb and Nothos, and the day after that Twaz. It’s not quite a dreadful werenight like the one we had before—from what Volatin says, those come less than once in a thousand years. But men with a were streak in them will come closer to changing then than on any other night for a long time to come. It’s—”

  “—One more thing to worry about,” Selatre finished for him.

  He stared at her in surprise and delight. “Well, well,” he said. “I didn’t know you spoke my language.”

  “I’m learning,” she said.

  X

  Three days after the monsters attacked Besant’s village, the lookout in the watchtower blew a long blast on his horn and shouted, “A chariot approaches from the south!” A few minutes later, he added with some excitement, “It’s Utreiz Embron’s son, by the gods!”

  Gerin was in the stables, fitting a new spoke to a chariot wheel. He dropped the knife with which he was making a final trim of the spoke. Raffo, who was helping him, said, “Well, we’ll know one way or the other.”

  “That we will,” Gerin answered, and hurried out into the courtyard.

  Men were also bustling out from the keep itself: everyone in Castle Fox—everyone in Gerin’s domain—had a vital stake in learning whether the Elabon Way had been reopened. Van caught the Fox’s eye and said, “Wishing you luck, Captain.”

  “I’ll take all I can get, thanks,” Gerin said.

  The drawbridge seemed to be crawling down. Gerin’s hands folded into fists; his nails bit into his palms. At last, with a thump, the drawbridge met the ground on the fa
r side of the ditch around the palisade. Utreiz’s chariot thumped over it. Even before the warrior spoke, a great weight lifted from Gerin’s heart, for he, his driver, and the other warrior in the car were all wreathed in smiles.

  “Dyaus and all the gods be praised, we smashed ’em!” Utreiz cried. He tried to go on, but a great cheer from everyone in the courtyard drowned the rest of his words. Rihwin the Fox leaped up into the car and planted a kiss on the startled Utreiz’s cheek. He had no designs on the other man’s body; that was just a southern way of showing joy at good news. In the rougher northlands, though, it was best used with caution. “Get off me!” Utreiz said, and several other rougher things the hubbub mercifully muffled.

  When the din died away a little, Gerin said, “Tell us all that befell. Maybe” —he glanced around pointedly— “we’ll be able to hear you now.”

  “Aye, lord prince.” Utreiz turned as if to push Rihwin out of the chariot, but Rihwin had already jumped down. Looking foolish, Utreiz resumed: “In one way, it was just as you said: Ricolf the Red and his men came up from the south to join us and Bevander against Bevon and his other two sons. Since they held the road, we had to sneak through the woods to the west to set up a common attack on the same day. We set out right at dawn, caught ’em by surprise worse than they did when they hit us and grabbed that stretch of road. Bevonis is dead. We caught Bevion; he offered me everything in the world not to let Bevander have him. Bevon, curse him, got away and holed up in his keep.”

  He had to shout the last part; cheering had erupted again. Through it, Gerin said, “Well done! The road is open, we have our men back from Schild’s holding—”

  “What’s this, lord?” Utreiz asked, and Gerin realized he hadn’t heard about Schild’s cry for help.

  He explained quickly, finishing, “You’d have been just as glad if the men I’d sent to Schild had stayed out a few days more, seeing as Rihwin was one of them. But all we have to do now is await Aragis’ troopers.” And hope they come, he added to himself.