King of the North

by Harry Turtledove

  To Gerin’s relief, Van proved right: they emerged from the wood with some daylight left. The idea of having to camp in among those trees chilled the Fox. Who could say what kind of ghosts lived in this place? He did not want to find out, and was glad he would not have to.

  “Rein in,” he told his son, and Duren obediently brought the chariot to a stop. Gerin stared down into the valley at the white-marble splendor of Biton’s shrine and the almost equally splendid wall of marble blocks surrounding its compound. “Will you look at that?” he said softly.

  “Amazing,” Van agreed, nodding. They’d both seen that shrine and that wall overthrown in the earthquake that had released the monsters from their age-long underground captivity and loosed them on the upper world. Van went on, “It looks the same as it always did.”

  “That it does,” Gerin said. It would have been impossible for any men in the northlands to restore that temple, built as it was with the full resources of the Empire of Elabon in its glory days and all the talented artists and artisans the Empire provided. But Biton had rebuilt the shrine, and in an instant. Because of that, Gerin had wondered if it would be even more magnificent than it had been before. But no—at least from a distance, it merely seemed the same.

  Ikos—the town, as opposed to the shrine—was different from what it had been. Biton had not restored the overthrown hostels and eateries as he had his own temple. There were fewer of them now than there had been before the quake; some then had been just hanging on, for traffic to the Sibyl’s underground chamber had shrunk since the Empire of Elabon cut itself off from the northlands. The ones who had been suffering, evidently, had not rebuilt. By the quiet streets that wound between the surviving shelters, more would have been superfluous.

  When the innkeepers saw eight cars bearing down on them at once, they fell with glad cries on the warriors those cars carried. Gerin remembered the outrageous prices he’d paid to rest his head in the days before the werenight. He and his companions got bigger rooms, with meals thrown in as part of the bargain, for less than half as much. Any business, these days, was better than none to the townsfolk.

  “How do these people live when the inns are empty, the way they look to be most of the time?” Van asked in the taproom later that evening.

  “They get rich, biking in one another’s laundry,” Gerin answered, deadpan.

  Van started to nod, then stared sharply and let out a snort. “You want to watch that tongue of yours, Fox. One fine day you’ll cut yourself with it.” Gerin stuck out the member in question and stared down at it, cross-eyed. Van made as if to drench him with a jack of ale, but didn’t do it. That relieved the Fox; his friend started tavern brawls for the sport of it.

  Gerin and Duren shared a chamber. Van took the one next to theirs, and didn’t want any of the rest of the Fox’s followers in there with him. Even with the bargain rates they were getting, Gerin, who made money last till it wore out, fretted at the extra expense. But it quickly became obvious Van did not intend to sleep alone. He made advances to both serving girls who were bringing food from the kitchens, and soon had one of them sitting on his lap, giggling at the way his beard tickled while he nuzzled her neck.

  The Fox sighed. One way or another, word of what Van was doing would get back to Fand, and that would start another of their fights. Gerin was sick of fights. How were you supposed to live your life in the middle of chaos? But some people reveled in such disorder.

  Van was one of them. “I know what you’re thinking, Captain,” he said. “Your face gives you away. And do you know what? I don’t care.”

  “That’s what Rihwin said, when he danced his wife away,” Gerin answered. Van wasn’t listening to him. Van wasn’t listening to anything save his drinking jack and the stiff lance he had in his breeches.

  Duren looked hungrily at the serving girl. But then he took a long look around the taproom. A couple of other wenches were serving there, true. But all the men they were serving were both older and far more prominent than he. He took a sip from his jack of ale and then said, “My chances aren’t good here tonight, are they?”

  The Fox set a hand on his shoulder. “You’re my son, sure enough,” he said. “There’re men twice your age—Dyaus, there’re men four times your age—who’d never make that calculation, and who’d sulk or rage for days because they didn’t have some doe-eyed girl helping ’em pull their breeches down.”

  Duren snorted. “That’s foolish.”

  “Aye, so it is,” Gerin answered. “Doesn’t stop it from happening all the time—and women aren’t immune to it, either, not even a little bit. People are foolish, son—haven’t you noticed that yet?”

  “Oh, maybe once or twice,” Duren said, as dryly as the Fox might have. Gerin stared at him, then started to laugh. If Duren did take over at what had been the holding of Ricolf the Red, Wacho, Hilmic, and Authari would never know what hit them. Ratkis Bronzecaster might, but the Fox had the feeling he’d be on Duren’s side.

  After a while, Gerin tipped his drinking jack over on its side and went upstairs carrying a candle, Duren trailing along behind him. Van and the serving maid had already gone up there; the noises from behind the outlander’s door told without any possible doubt what they were doing. The amatory racket came through the wall, too. As Gerin used the candle to light a couple of lamps, Duren said, “How are we supposed to sleep with that going on?”

  “I expect we’ll manage,” Gerin said. A moment later, a moan from the other side of the wall contradicted him. He thought about rapping on the timbers, but forbore; as any man was liable to do, Van grew testy if interrupted, and a testy Van was not something to contemplate without trepidation. “We’ll manage,” the Fox repeated, this time as much to convince himself as his son.

  When the shutters were closed, they made the bedroom dark and hot and stuffy. Leaving them open let in fresh air, but also bugs and, come morning, daylight, which woke Gerin earlier than he would have liked.

  He sat up and rubbed his eyes with something les than enthusiasm. He hadn’t slept as well as he would have liked, and he had had a little more ale than he should have—not enough for a true hangover, but plenty to give him the edge of a headache behind his eyes and to make his mouth taste like something scraped off the dung heap.

  To improve his mood yet further, a rhythmic pounding started in the chamber next door. That was enough to wake Duren, who stared at the wall. “I was asleep,” he said, as if not quite believing it. He lowered his voice. “Is he at it still, Father?”

  “Not still, the gods be thanked. Only again.” Gerin raised an eyebrow. “If he’s not down by breakfast, we’ll rap on the door. Of course, if he’s not down by breakfast, the serving girl won’t be, either, so breakfast may be late.”

  Van did come down for breakfast, looking mightily contented with the world. After bread and honey and ale, he and Gerin and Duren, along with Ricolf’s four leading vassals, walked down to Biton’s shrine, a little south of the hamlet of Ikos.

  At close range as from a distance, the shrine and its grounds seemed identical to the way they had been before the earthquake tumbled them and loosed the monsters on the northlands. There within the marble wall was the statue of the dying Trokmê; there not far away stood the twin gold-and-ivory statues of Ros the Fierce, conqueror of the northlands, and Oren the Builder, who had erected the temple to Biton in half-Sithonian, half-Elabonian style.

  Both Ros and Oren seemed perfect and complete. Gerin scratched his head at that. After the temblor, he’d taken away the jewel-encrusted golden head of Oren when it rolled outside the bounds of Biton’s sacred precinct, within which it was death to steal. The precious metal and gems had helped him greatly in the years since, and yet here they were, restored as they had been. The Fox shrugged. The ways and abilities of gods were beyond those of men.

  Yet not even Biton, it seemed, had been able to bring back to life the guardsmen and eunuch priests who had served him. All those here now looked young (though more and mor
e of the world looked young to Gerin these days), and no faces were familiar. The ritual, however, remained the same: before a suppliant went down below the temple to put a question to the Sibyl, money changed hands. Because Gerin was prince of the north, his offering was larger than any ordinary baron’s would have been. That irked him, but he paid. You tried to constrain the gods, or their priests, at your peril.

  When the plump leather sack he handed to a eunuch had been judged and found adequate, the priest said, “Enter lord Biton’s shrine and pray for wisdom and enlightenment.”

  “Remember when you used to have to queue up even to get into the temple?” Van said to Gerin. “Not like that any more.”

  “But perhaps it shall be again one day,” the eunuch said before Gerin could reply. “The fame of Biton’s restored temple has spread widely through the northlands, but times are so unsettled, few make the journey despite its reputation: travel is less safe than it might be.”

  “I know,” Gerin answered. “I’ve done everything I could do make it safer in the lands whose overlord I am, but it’s not all it could be. That hurts trade, and costs money, too.”

  He and his companions followed the eunuch into Biton’s shrine. As always on entering there, the ancient image of the farseeing god caught and held the Fox’s eye, more than all the architectural splendor Oren had lavished on the building surrounding it. Given a choice, Oren surely would have discarded the image and replaced it with a modern piece from one of his stable of sculptors. That he hadn’t discarded it suggested someone, whether a priest of Biton, the Sibyl at the time, or the god himself, had given the Elabonian Emperor no choice.

  The statue, if it could be dignified by that word, was a pillar of black basalt, almost plain. The only marks suggesting it was more than a simple stele, were an erect phallus jutting from its midsection and a pair of eyes scratched into the stone a hand’s breadth or two below the top. Gerin studied those eyes. Just for an instant, they seemed brown and alive and human—or rather, divine. He blinked, and they were scratches on stone once more.

  Along with his son, his friend, and Ricolf’s vassals, he sat in the front pews of the temple and, peering down at the tiny tesserae of the floor mosaic, prayed that the farseeing god would give him the guidance he sought. When he raised his eyes, the eunuch priest said, “I shall conduct you to the Sibyl’s chamber. If you will come with me—”

  A black slit in the ground led to the countless caverns below Biton’s shrine. Duren’s eyes were large as, side by side with Gerin, he set foot on the stone steps that eased the suppliant’s way on the beginning of the journey. Gerin’s heart pounded, though he had been this way several times before. Behind him, Wacho and Hilmic muttered nervously.

  He wondered whom Biton’s priests had found for a Sibyl to replace Selatre. When the farseeing god restored his temple compound, he’d wanted to restore Selatre to her place as well. Gerin would not have—indeed, how could he have?—hindered that, but Selatre had begged Biton to let her stay in the new life she’d found, and the god, to the Fox’s relief and joy, had done as she asked. Now Biton spoke through someone new.

  The air in the caverns was fresh and cool and moist, with a hint of a breeze. Gerin, with his itch to learn, wished he knew how it circulated rather than merely that it did. The priest carried a torch, and others burned at intervals along the rock wall. The flickering light did strange, sometimes frightening things to the shadows the travelers along that ancient way cast.

  Yet it also picked out sparkling bits of rock crystal set into the rough walls of the passage, some white, some orange, some red as blood. And, now and again, the torchlight showed ways branching off from the main track, some open, some walled up with brick and further warded by potent cantrips.

  Gerin pointed to one of those walled-off passages. “Do the monsters still lurk back there, behind the spells that hold them at bay?”

  “We believe so,” the priest answered, his sexless voice quiet and troubled. “Those wards are, however, as the lord Biton made them. None of us has been past them to be certain—nor, I might add, have the monsters made any effort to return to the world of light.”

  “Those horrible things.” Ratkis Bronzecaster made a hand sign to avert ill-luck. “They gave us no end of trouble when they were loose.” And do I get any credit for tricking the gods into taking them off the surface of the world? Gerin thought. Not likely. But then Ratkis went on with a thought that hadn’t occurred to him before: “I wonder if they have gods of their own down here.”

  Now Gerin’s fingers twisted in the avert-evil sign. Some of the monsters—not all—might well be smart enough to conceive of gods, or to have whatever gods who already dwelt in these caves take notice of them: philosophers argued endlessly about how the link between gods and men (or even between gods and not-quite-men) came into being. The Fox was certain of one thing—he didn’t want to meet whatever gods might dwell down here in this endless gloom.

  “I wonder what Geroge and Tharma would think if we ever brought them down here,” Duren said as he walked along the fairly smooth path uncounted generations of feet had worn in the stone.

  “That’s another good question,” Gerin agreed. He started to add that he didn’t want to answer it, but stopped and held his peace. If the monsters at Fox Keep did prove troublesome as they matured, he might have no choices left but to slay them or send them down here with their fellows.

  The passage wound down and down through the living rock. Most times, that was just a semipoetic phrase to the Fox. Down in the midst of it, though, the rock of the cave walls did seem alive, as if it were dimly conscious not only of his presence but also of separating him from the monsters in the deeper, walled-off galleries.

  And it would have twitched and writhed like a living thing in the earthquake that had freed the monsters. Gerin wondered what being underground here when the quake struck would have been like. He was glad he hadn’t found out; he and Van had spoken with Selatre (whose name, of course, he had not then known) less than a day before the temblor shook the whole northlands.

  A pool of brighter light ahead marked the entrance to the Sibyl’s chamber. The priest asked, “Would you like me to withdraw so you can put your question to Biton’s voice on earth in private?” Having him withdraw would have involved paying him more. When no one seemed ready to do that, he shrugged and led the suppliants into the chamber.

  Torchlight shimmered from the Sibyl’s throne, which looked as if it was carved from a single, impossibly immense black pearl. Clad in a simple white linen shift, the girl on the throne was plainly of the old northlands stock whose blood still ran strong around Ikos; by her looks, she might have been cousin to Selatre.

  “What would you ask my lord Biton?” she asked. Her voice, a rich contralto, made Gerin move her age up a few years: though maid-slim, she was probably on his side of twenty, not the other one.

  He asked the question in exactly the words upon which he and Ricolf’s vassals had agreed: “Should my son Duren succeed his grandfather Ricolf the Red as baron of the holding over which Ricolf held suzerainty till he died?”

  The Sibyl listened intently—as well she might, for she was listening for her divine master as well as herself. The mantic fit hit her hard, as it had the predecessors of hers whom Gerin had seen on that black-pearl throne: Selatre, and before her an ancient crone who had been Biton’s voice on earth for three generations of suppliants.

  Eyes rolled back in her head to show only white, the Sibyl writhed and twitched. Her arms jerked and flailed, seemingly at random. Then she stiffened. Her lips parted. She spoke, not with her own voice, but with the firm, confident baritone Biton always used;

  “The young man shall hold all the castles

  And all within shall be his vassals.

  But peril lurks, like dark in caves

  And missteps here fill many graves.

  Aye! Danger lurks in many shapes,

  O’ershadowing you like bunchèd grapes.”

&nbs
p; V

  Ricolf’s vassals were being difficult. Gerin had been sure they would be difficult, from the instant the eunuch priest led him, his son, Van, and them out of the Sibyl’s chamber. Now, back at the hostel in the village of Ikos, they, or at least three of them, openly bickered with the Fox.

  “Didn’t mean a thing,” Wacho Fidus’ son declared, thumping his balled fist down onto the table. “Not one single, solitary thing.”

  “‘The young man shall hold all the castles/ And all within shall be his vassals’?” Gerin quoted. “That means nothing to you. Are you deaf and blind as well as—” He broke off; he’d been about to say stupid. “We asked about Ricolf’s holdings, and the god said he’d rule all the castles. What more do you want?” A good dose of brains wouldn’t hurt. You could take them by enema, so they’d be close to what you use for thinking now.

  “The god said ‘all the castles,’” Authari Broken-Tooth declared. “The god said nothing about Ricolf’s castles. Duren here is your heir, too. When you die, he stands to inherit your lands and the keeps on them.”

  Gerin exhaled through his nose. “That’s clever, I must admit,” he said tightly. “Are you sure you didn’t study Sithonian hair-splitting—excuse me, philosophy—south of the High Kirs? The only problem is, the question wasn’t about the keeps I control. It asked specifically about the holding of Ricolf the Red. When you take the question and the answer together, there’s only one conclusion you can reach.”

  “We seem to have found another one,” Hilmic Barrelstaves said, tipping back his drinking jack and pouring the last swallow’s worth of ale down his throat. He waved the jack around to show he wanted a refill.

  “Aye, you’ve found another one,” Gerin answered. “Is it one that will let you keep the oath you swore to Dyaus and Biton and Baivers”—he pointed to Hilmic’s drinking jack—“and all the other gods?”

  Wacho, Hilmic, and Authari appeared to take no notice of that. But Ratkis Bronzecaster, who’d said little, looked even more thoughtful than he already had. Oathbreaker wasn’t a name anyone wanted to get for himself. It hurt you in this world and was liable to hurt you worse in the next.