King of the North

by Harry Turtledove

  Hilmic Barrelstaves was short and stocky, with bowed legs that had probably given him his ekename. A streak of white ran through his black hair, almost like a horse’s blaze. The end of a scar that must have seamed his scalp just showed on his forehead. Gerin had seen cases like that before, where hair grew in pale along the length of a healed wound.

  Wacho, by contrast, could have been a Trokmê from his looks; he was tall and blond and ruddy, with pale eyes above knobby cheekbones and a long, thin nose. Ratkis seemed an ordinary Elabonian till you noticed his hands, which were callused and scarred, probably from the craft from which he derived his sobriquet.

  As with Authari, Gerin knew them, but not well. They greeted him as equal to equal, which was technically correct—till Ricolf had a successor they acknowledged, they were their own men—but struck the Fox as arrogant all the same. He let it go. Power still lay with him.

  “Shall we start the wrangle now, or wait till after supper?” Authari asked once the greetings were done.

  “No wrangle,” Gerin answered. “Two things can happen. First, you can accept Duren as your baron straightaway—”

  “We won’t,” Wacho said, and Hilmic nodded emphatic agreement. Neither Authari nor Ratkis backed Wacho by word or gesture. That disconcerted him; he choked down whatever he might have been about to add and instead asked, “What’s the other thing?”

  “We wait to see what the Sibyl at Ikos says,” Gerin told him. “If Biton says Duren is to rule here, rule he will, and nothing you try to do about it will change things a bit. And if the god says he’s not meant to be your baron, he’ll go back to Fox Keep with me. Where’s the wrangle in any of that? Or don’t you agree to the terms Authari and I settled on?” Without changing his voice in any easily describable way, he let Wacho know disagreeing with those terms would not be a good idea.

  Ratkis spoke for the first time: “The terms are fair, lord prince. More than fair: you could have brought a real army with you, not a guard, and installed the lad in this keep by force. But sometimes, when Biton speaks through the Sibyl, what he means isn’t clear till long afterwards. Life’s not always simple. What do we do if it’s complicated here?”

  Gerin almost grabbed him by the hand and swore friendship with him for life for nothing more than recognizing that ambiguity could exist. To most men in the northlands, something was either good, in which case it was perfection, or bad, in which case it was abomination. The Fox supposed that made keeping track of things simple, but simplicity was not always a virtue.

  “Here’s what I have in mind,” he said. “If anyone thinks the Sibyl’s verse can have more than one meaning, even if interpreted with all possible goodwill, then we put it to the four of you on the one hand and Duren, Van, the lady Selatre, and me on the other. Whoever has the most backers among those eight will see his view prevail.”

  “And if the eight of us divide evenly?” Authari asked.

  “The four of you against the four of us, you mean?” Gerin said.

  “That seems likeliest,” Authari answered.

  The Fox was about to reply, but Duren spoke first, his voice for once man-deep, not cracking at all: “Then we go to war, and edged bronze will tell who has the better right.”

  “I was about to say the same thing,” Gerin said, “but my son—Ricolf’s grandson, I remind you once more—put it better than I could hope to do.” He didn’t add that he wanted a war with Ricolf’s vassals about as much as he wanted an outbreak of pestilence in the village by Fox Keep.

  “If we go to war, Aragis the Archer will—” Wacho began.

  “No, Aragis the Archer won’t,” Gerin interrupted. “Oh, Aragis may choose to fight me over Ricolf’s holding here, but he won’t be doing it for you and he won’t do you any good. I’ll have beaten you before his men get this far north, I promise you that. A bear and a longtooth may quarrel over the carcass of a deer, but it doesn’t matter to the deer any more, because it’s already dead.”

  Hilmic Barrelstaves scowled at him. “I knew it was going to be like this. You come down here and threaten us—”

  “By all the gods, I’ve gone out of my way not to threaten you,” Gerin shouted, clapping a hand to his forehead. When he lost his temper, he usually did it for effect. Now he was perilously close to losing it in truth. “We could overrun this holding: Ratkis said as much. You know it, I know it, any half-witted one-eyed dog sniffing through rubbish down by the shore of the Orynian Ocean knows it, too. Instead of that, I proposed letting Biton decide. If that didn’t satisfy you, I proposed a way to solve the difficulty. And if you won’t heed the god and you won’t heed men, sirrah, you deserve to have your thick head knocked in.”

  A silence rather like the one just after the crash of a thunderbolt filled the courtyard to Ricolf’s castle. Authari chuckled nervously. “Well, if the god is kind, he’ll give us a response that tells us what we want to know. Then we won’t have to worry about any of the rest of this.”

  Gerin pounced on that. “So you do agree—all four of you do agree—to let Biton speak on this matter?”

  One after another, Ricolf’s vassals nodded, Authari first, Hilmic last, looking as if he hated to be moving his head up and down. Ratkis Bronzecaster said, “Aye, we agree. We’ll take any oath you set to bind us to it, and you’ll take ours to do the same.”

  “Let it be so,” Gerin said at once. Of the four of them, Ratkis impressed him as a man of sense. Hilmic and Wacho spoke before they thought, if they thought at all. He wasn’t sure what to make of Authari, which probably meant Authari would play both ends against the middle if he thought he saw a chance.

  “Let it be so,” Authari said now, “and let us sup. Perhaps this will look better after meat and bread.”

  “Almost anything looks better after meat and bread,” Gerin said agreeably.

  Ricolf had always set a good table, if not a fancy one, and his cooks carried on after his passing: along with beef and roast fowl, they set out plates of boiled crayfish, fried trout, and turtles baked in their shells. There was plenty of good chewy bread to eat along with the meat and soak up the juices, and scallions and cloves of fragrant garlic to spice up the food. For the hundredth, maybe the thousandth, time, Gerin missed pepper, though he could find no complaint with what was set before him.

  His men and those who owed allegiance to Ricolf—or rather, to his chief vassals—crowded the hall. They got on well enough, even after the servants had refilled their drinking jacks a good many times. Some of Gerin’s retainers and some of Ricolf’s had fought side by side in old wars, after the werenight and against the monsters and in the four-cornered struggle that had wracked Bevon’s barony for so long. If they had to battle one another, it would not be with any great enthusiasm.

  That didn’t mean they wouldn’t battle one another. Parol Chickpea said, “If the lord prince gives the order, we’ll squash you lads underfoot like a nest of cockroaches. I won’t much care for that, but what can you do?”

  “You can get beaten back to your own land where you belong,” said the fellow sitting beside him: one of Ricolf’s troopers, and one who, by his look and bearing, a man of sense would not annoy.

  Parol was a lot of things, but seldom sensible. A monster had bitten off a large chunk of one of his buttocks; Gerin wondered if sitting lopsided for years had unbalanced his brain. Probably not, the Fox judged. Parol hadn’t been bright before he developed a list.

  “No one in this hall wants to go to war with anyone else here,” Gerin said loudly, wishing Parol would keep his mouth shut. “If we wanted to go to war, we would have done it already. I always reckoned Ricolf a friend and his men allies. Father Dyaus grant that my men and those of this holding always stay friends and allies.”

  “Truth there,” Ratkis Bronzecaster said, and raised his drinking jack in salute. Gerin was pleased to drink with him.

  A buxom young serving girl did everything she could to attract Duren’s notice but plop herself down in his lap. Duren did notice her, too
. His eyes stuck to her the way little scraps of cloth would stick to amber after you rubbed it. But he did not get up and follow her, despite the glances she kept throwing over her shoulder.

  “Good for you,” Gerin told him. “If you’re going to rule this holding, you don’t want to get a reputation as a man who thinks with his spear first and his head later. You’re a likely-looking lad; finding willing women shouldn’t be any trouble for you. But this wench—who knows what she’s after, making up so soon to the fellow who’s likely to be her overlord?”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Duren answered. What else he was thinking, though, was also obvious from the way he kept watching the girl.

  Wacho Fidus’ son breathed ale fumes into Gerin’s face. “So you will be going on to Ikos, eh, lord prince?”

  “A man with a gift for the obvious,” Gerin observed, which, as he’d expected, made Wacho stare at him in beery incomprehension. Sighing, he went on, “As a matter of fact, what point in going on to Ikos if you retainers of Ricolf’s try to ignore what the god tells you if it’s not to your liking? I don’t want to do it, mind you, but we might as well just fight the war. You’d have no doubt of what you were supposed to do then, anyhow.”

  Wacho understood that well enough, and looked appalled. He said, “No such thing, lord prince. We were just talking about what to do if the Sibyl’s verse turned out to be obsc—ob—hard to make head or tail of, that’s all. If it’s plain, we have no quarrel.”

  “By everything you and your three comrades have said and done, you’d do anything to show the Sibyl’s verse was obscure, regardless of whether that’s really so,” Gerin said. “I don’t know why I’m wasting my time with you.”

  He knew perfectly well why he was wasting his time with them: he didn’t want to get into a little war down here, not when two bigger ones were building in the west and Aragis the Archer loomed, watching and waiting, in the south. But if he could push Ricolf’s vassals into forgetting that, he’d do it without hesitation or compunction.

  Still looking horrified, Wacho went off and collared Authari, Ratkis, and Hilmic. The four of them put their heads together, then came back over to the Fox. “See here,” Authari said, his voice full of nervous bluster. “I thought we had a bargain to abide by what the Sibyl at Ikos said.”

  “So did I,” Gerin answered. “But when I got down here, what I found you people meaning was that you would interpret Biton’s words they way they suited you, no matter what he said.”

  “We never said any such thing,” Hilmic Barrelstaves said indignantly.

  “I didn’t say you said it. I said you meant it,” Gerin told him. “‘What do we do if we don’t agree? What do we do if we don’t agree?’ You might as well have been crickets, all chirping the same note.” He got up as if to stamp out of the great hall, as if to stamp out of Ricolf’s keep altogether, in spite of the ghosts that turned the night to terror.

  “Give us an oath,” Ratkis said. “Give us an oath we can swear and we will swear it. Authari was talking about that with you, I know, and I said as much earlier myself. We want—I want—fair dealing here.”

  Him Gerin believed. He was less sure about the other three. But a strong enough oath would attract the notice of even the rather lackadaisical Elabonian gods if it was violated. “All right. Will you swear by Father Dyaus and farseeing Biton to accept the words of the Sibyl on their face if there is any possible way to do so. Will you also swear that, should you violate your oath, you pray you will have only sorrow and misfortune in this world and that your soul will not even wander the world by night, but will rest forever in the hottest of the five hells?”

  Ricolf’s four vassals looked at each other, then went off to put their heads together again. When they came back, Authari Broken-Tooth said, “That’s a strong oath you require of us.”

  “That’s the idea,” Gerin said, exhaling through his nose. “What point to an oath you don’t fear breaking?”

  “Will you swear the same oath?” Wacho demanded.

  By his tone, he expected the Fox to recoil in dismay from the very idea. But Gerin said, “Of course I will. I don’t fear what Biton says. If Duren isn’t fated to rule this holding, the god will make that plain. And if he is so fated, Biton will tell us that, too. So I will swear that oath. I’ll swear it now, this instant. Join me?”

  They went off once more. Gerin sipped his ale and watched them argue. It seemed to be Authari and Ratkis on one side, Wacho and Hilmic on the other. He couldn’t hear them, but he would have been willing to guess which men were on which side.

  At last, rather glumly, the barons returned. Speaking for them, Authari said, “Very well, lord prince. We will swear the oath with you. If we disagree in spite of it, we will settle the disagreements as you proposed. In short, we agree with all your proposals, straight down the line.”

  “No, we don’t agree with them,” Hilmic Barrelstaves said angrily. “But we’ll go along with them. It’s either that or fight you, and our chances there don’t look good to us, not even if Aragis comes in on our side.”

  “You’re right,” Gerin said. “Your chances wouldn’t have been good. Shall we swear now, before our men?”

  Wacho and Hilmic looked as if they would have delayed if they could have found any good reason for doing so. But Ratkis Bronzecaster said, “It would be best so. That way, our retainers can have no doubt about what the agreement is.”

  “Exactly my thought,” Gerin said. It also makes it harder for you to go about breaking the oath later: your own men will call you on it if you do.

  When the two hesitant barons nodded at last, Duren said, “I will swear this oath, also. If this is to be my holding, it will be mine, so I should speak for myself in matters that touch on it.”

  “Good enough,” Gerin said heartily, and Ricolf’s vassals also made approving noises. Down deep, Gerin wondered how good it really was. Would his son, if he became lord here, suddenly start ignoring everything he said? Duren was of about the right age to do something like that. And his mother, from whom he drew half his blood, had always been one to follow her impulses to the hilt, whether it was running away with Gerin or running away from him a few years later. Was Elise’s blood showing itself in Duren? And if it was, what could the Fox do about it?

  He quickly answered that one: nothing. Forcing the issue by bringing Duren here had been his idea. Now he would have to face the consequences, whatever those turned out to be.

  He got to his feet. So did Duren, and so, a moment later, did Ricolf’s four leading vassals. Gerin looked at them, hoping one of their number—maybe Authari, who liked to hear himself talk—would announce to the expectantly waiting warriors his approval of what they had agreed upon. That would make it look as if the oath had been in large measure their idea, not his.

  But Authari and his comrades stood mute, leaving it up to the Fox. He made the best of it he could: “We now seal by this oath we are about to swear to abide by the farseeing god’s choice as to whether Duren should rule this holding, the oath setting out what we hope will happen to us in this world and the next if we go against any of its provisions. I will say the terms, and Ricolf’s vassals and my son will repeat them after me, all of us committing ourselves to this course.”

  He waited for any objection from his men or from those who owed allegiance to Ricolf’s vassals. When none came, he said, “I begin.” He turned to Duren and to Ricolf’s lordlets: “Say each phrase of the oath after me: ‘By Dyaus All-Father and farseeing Biton I swear—’”

  “‘By Dyaus All-Father and farseeing Biton I swear—’” Authari and Ratkis, Wacho and Hilmic, and Duren all echoed him. He listened carefully to make sure they did. If not everyone swore the same oath, people would be able to question its validity. That was the last thing he wanted.

  He made the oath as comprehensive and strict as he could, so much so that Wacho and Hilmic and even Authari looked at him sidelong as provision after stern provision rolled off his tongue. Duren took
the oath without hesitation. So did Ratkis Bronzecaster. The Fox thought Ratkis honest. If he wasn’t, he was so shameless as to be deadly dangerous.

  At last he could think of nothing more to bind Ricolf’s vassals to their promises. “So may it be,” he finished, and, with evident relief, they repeated the words after him: “So may it be.” The oath had done what it could do. The rest would be up to the men who had followed Ricolf so long—and to the farseeing god.

  Eight chariots rattled down the narrow track through the strange and haunted wood that grew around the little valley housing the hamlet of Ikos and Biton’s shrine nearby. Gerin, Duren, and Van rode in one; their retainers filled three more; and Authari, Wacho, Ratkis, and Hilmic each headed one crew.

  “I’ve never been to see the Sibyl, not in all my days,” Hilmic Barrelstaves said, his voice unwontedly quiet as he peered this way and that into the wood. “Did I see a—? No, I couldn’t have.” He shook his head, denying the idea, whatever it had been, even to himself.

  Gerin had been through that curious wood a good many times, but he was wary there, too. You were never quite sure what you saw or heard—or what saw and heard you. Sometimes you got the strong feeling you were better off not knowing.

  Even Van spoke softly, as if not wanting to rouse whatever powers rested in uneasy sleep. “I think we’ll make it to the town before sundown,” he said. “Hard to be sure, when the leaves block the sunlight so—and when you’re in this place any which way. Time feels—loose—here, so it’s hard to judge how long you’ve really been traveling.”

  “This forest is as old as the world, I think,” Gerin answered, “and now, it’s a little, mm, disconnected from the rest of the world. It puts up with this road through it, but only just barely.”

  Duren drove on in silence. The horses were nervous, but he controlled them. Like Hilmic, he was making his first visit to Ikos, and he was as busy as Ricolf’s vassal trying to look in every direction at once, and as wide-eyed at the things he was—and the things he wasn’t—seeing.