King of the North

by Harry Turtledove

  Duren said, “From all I’ve heard and read of Biton’s prophetic verse, the god never names names straight out.”

  “What do you know, lad?” Wacho said with a sneer.

  “I know insolence when I hear it,” Duren snapped. Physically, he was not a match for the bigger, older man, but his voice made Wacho sit up and take notice. Duren went on, “I know my letters, too, so I can learn things I don’t see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears. Can you say the same?”

  Before Wacho answered, Gerin put in, “I’ve been to the Sibyl several times now, over the years, and the next name I hear in one of those verses will be the first.” Van nodded agreement.

  Ratkis broke his silence: “That is so, or it has been for me, at any rate. It gives me one thing more to think about.”

  “You’re not going to turn against us, are you?” Hilmic Barrelstaves demanded. “You’d be sorry for that—three against one would—”

  “It wouldn’t be three against one for long,” Gerin broke in. Hilmic glared at him. He glared back, partly from anger, partly for effect. Then, musingly, he went on, “If your neighbors outside Ricolf’s barony hear how you’d seek to go back on your sworn word, they might hit you from behind while you were fighting Ratkis, too, for fear you’d treat them the same way after you’d beaten him. And that doesn’t begin to take into account what I’d do.”

  He carefully avoided saying exactly what he would do. Absent other troubles, he would have descended on Ricolf’s holding with everything he had, to make sure it would be in Duren’s hands before Aragis the Archer could so much as think of responding. Absent other troubles—He laughed bitterly. Other troubles were anything but absent.

  Then Ratkis said, “I expect I can hold my own. If the Trokmê tide didn’t swamp me, I don’t suppose my neighbors will.” He looked from Hilmic to Wacho to Authari Broken-Tooth. “They know I don’t go out looking for mischief. Aye, they know that, so they do. And they know that if mischief comes looking for me, I mostly give it a set of lumps and send it on its way.”

  By the sour expressions on the faces of his fellow vassal barons, they did know that. Authari said, “Do you want to see us dragged into doing whatever Gerin the Fox here orders us to do?”

  “Not so you’d notice,” Ratkis answered. “But I can’t say I’m dead keen on going against what a god says, either, and looks to me as if that’s what the three of you have in mind.”

  Wacho Fidus’ son and Hilmic shook their heads with vehemence that struck Gerin as overwrought. Smoothly, Authari said, “Not a bit of it, Ratkis—nothing of the sort. But we do have to be certain what the lord Biton means, don’t we?”

  “I think we’re all of us clear enough on that,” Van rumbled, and then drained his drinking jack. “If we weren’t, some people wouldn’t be trying so hard to get around the plain words.”

  “I resent that,” Authari said, his versatile voice now hot with anger.

  Van got to his feet and stared down at Authari. “You do, eh?” He set a hand on the hilt of his sword. “How much d’you resent it? Care to step onto the street and show me how much you resent it? What d’you suppose’ll happen after that? D’you suppose your successor, whoever he is, will resent it, too?”

  The taproom got very quiet. The warriors who’d accompanied Ricolf’s vassals eyed those who’d come to Ikos with Gerin, and were eyed in return. And everyone waited to hear and see what Authari Broken-Tooth would do.

  Gerin did not think Authari a coward; he’d never heard nor seen anything to give him that idea. But he did not blame Authari for licking his lips and keeping silent while he thought: Van was two hands’ breadth taller, and likely weighed half again as much as he did.

  “Well?” the outlander demanded. “Are you coming out?”

  “I find—I find—I am not so angry as I was a moment before,” Authari said. “Sometimes a man’s temper can make him say things he wishes he had kept to himself.”

  To Gerin’s relief, Van accepted that, and sat back down at once. “Well, you’re right there, and no mistake,” he said. “Even the Fox has done it, and he’s more careful with his tongue than any man I’ve ever known.”

  Much of what Van called being careful was simply knowing when to keep his mouth shut. But Gerin knew not to say that, too. What he did say was, “Since you’re not out of temper now, Authari, can you take a calmer look at the verses the god spoke through the Sibyl and admit the lines that talk about my son can have only one meaning?”

  Authari looked resentful again, but carefully did not claim he was. Gerin’s intellectual challenge was as hard for him to withstand as Van’s physical challenge had been. At last, very much against his will, Ricolf’s vassal admitted, “There may be some truth in what you say.”

  That made Hilmic and Wacho let out indignant bleats. “You’ve sold us, you traitor!” Wacho shouted, quickly red in the face with fury. “I ought to cut your heart out for this, or worse if I could think of it.”

  “I’d face you any day,” Authari retorted. “I’d face the Fox, too. I don’t fear him in the field, not when he has so many concerns besides me. But Biton? Who can fight against a god and hope to win? Since the farseeing one knows my heart, he knows I thought to oppose his will. But thought is not deed.”

  “You speak truth there,” Gerin agreed. “Now, though, you will recognize Duren as your rightful overlord?”

  “So I will,” Authari said sourly, “when he is permanently installed in Ricolf’s keep, and not a day sooner.”

  “That is fair,” Gerin said.

  “This was all your idea, and now you’re running away from it?” Wacho bellowed. Hilmic Barrelstaves set a hand on his arm and whispered in his ear. Wacho calmed down, or seemed to. All the same, Gerin wouldn’t have cared to be Authari right then. By himself, Authari was more powerful than either Wacho or Hilmic. Was he more powerful than both of them put together? Ratkis had said he could hold out against all three of Ricolf’s other leading vassals, so presumably Authari could hold out against two of them. But that didn’t mean he’d enjoy doing it.

  And then Duren said, quietly but firmly, “When I succeed my grandfather, my vassals will not fight private wars against one another. Anyone who starts that kind of war will face me along with his foe.”

  Gerin had imposed that rule on his own vassals. For that matter, Ricolf had enforced it while he lived. A strong overlord could. All of Ricolf’s leading vassals had assumed Duren, at least apart from Gerin, would not be a strong overlord. But Duren hadn’t said anything about asking help from his father, nor had he sounded as if he thought he’d need it. By the looks on their faces, Authari, Hilmic, and Wacho were all having second thoughts.

  So was Gerin. He’d done his best to train Duren up to be a leader one day. He hadn’t realized he’d succeeded so well, or so fast. A boy turned into a man when he could fill a man’s sandals. By that reckoning—his games among the serving women at Fox Keep to one side—Duren was a man now. Scratching his head, Gerin wondered exactly when that had happened, and why he hadn’t noticed.

  Ratkis Bronzecaster noticed. Speaking to Duren rather than Gerin, he asked, “When do you expect to take up the lordship of the holding that had been your grandfather’s?”

  “Not this season,” Duren answered at once. “After my father has beaten Adiatunnus and the Gradi and no longer needs me by his side.”

  “Your father is lucky to have you for a son,” Ratkis observed, with no irony Gerin could hear.

  Duren shrugged. “What I am, he made me.”

  In some ways, that was true. In those ways, it might have been more true of Duren than of a good many youths, for, with his mother gone, Gerin had had more of his raising than he would have otherwise. But in other ways, as the Fox had just realized, Duren had outstripped his hopes. And so he said, “A father can only shape what’s already in a son.”

  Ratkis nodded at that. “You’re not wrong, lord prince. If a lad is a donkey, you can’t make him into a horse you’d w
ant pulling your chariot. But if he’s already a horse, you can show him how to run.” He turned to Duren. “When that time comes, you’ll have no trouble from me, not unless you show you deserve it, which I don’t think you will. And I say that to you for your sake, not on account of who your father is.”

  “I will try to be a lord who deserves good vassalage,” Duren answered.

  Ratkis nodded again, saying, “I think you may well do that.” After a moment, Authari Broken-Tooth nodded, too. Hilmic and Wacho sat silent and unhappy. They’d been as difficult and obstructive as they could and, by all the signs, had nothing to show for it.

  If only all my foes were so easy to handle, the Fox thought.

  The drive back from the Sibyl’s shrine to the Elabon Way showed the damage the monsters had done in their brief time above ground. The peasant villages that lay beyond the old, half-haunted wood west of Ikos were shadows of what they had been. In a way, that made the journey back to the main highway easier, for the peasants, who were their own masters, owing no overlord allegiance, had been apt to demonstrate their freedom by preying on passing travelers.

  “Serves ’em right,” Van said as they rode past another village where most of the huts were falling to ruin and a handful of frightened folk stared at the chariots with wide, hungry eyes. “They’d have knocked us over the head for our weapons and armor, so many good-byes to ’em.”

  “Land needs to be farmed,” Gerin said, upset at the sight of saplings springing up in what had been wheatfields. “It shouldn’t rest idle.”

  The state of the land was not the only worry on his mind, for he very much hoped he would find that his warriors had rested idle while he was consulting the Sibyl. Ricolf’s vassals had men enough to crush his small force if they set their minds to it, and to seize or kill him as he returned to their holding, too. He vowed to take Wacho and Hilmic—and Authari, for luck—down to the underworld with him if their followers turned traitor.

  But when he came upon those of his troopers he’d left behind, they and the men who had served Ricolf were getting on well. When they recognized him and his companions, they hurried toward them, loudly calling for news.

  “We don’t know what we’re going to do,” Wacho said, still unready to resign himself to recognizing Duren as his suzerain.

  “No, that isn’t so,” Ratkis Bronzecaster said before Gerin—or Duren—could scream at Wacho. “Sounds like the god thinks the lad should come after his grandfather. But he won’t take over Ricolf’s keep quite yet.”

  “Why aren’t we fighting the Fox, then?” one of the soldiers demanded. “His kin have no call taking over our holding.”

  “Biton thinks otherwise,” Ratkis said; having made up his mind, he followed his decision to the hilt. With a nod to one of his comrades, he added, “Isn’t that right, Authari?”

  Authari Broken-Tooth looked as if he hated the other baron for putting him on the spot. “Aye,” he answered, more slowly than he should have. He could hardly have been less enthusiastic had he been discussing his own imminent funeral obsequies.

  But that aye, however reluctant, produced both acclamations for Duren and loud arguments. Gerin glanced toward Hilmic Barrelstaves and Wacho Fidus’ son. Hilmic, sensibly, was keeping quiet. Wacho looked as if he had no intention of doing anything of the sort.

  Gerin caught his eye. Wacho glared truculent defiance at him. He’d seen it done better. He shook his head, a single tightly controlled movement. Wacho glared even more fiercely. The Fox didn’t glare back. Instead, he looked away, a gesture of cool contempt that said Wacho wasn’t worth noticing and had better not make himself worth noticing.

  Had Wacho shouted, Gerin’s men might have found themselves in a bloody broil with the troopers who followed Ricolf’s vassals. But Wacho didn’t shout. He was big and full of bluster, but the Fox had managed to get across a warning he could not mistake.

  Gerin said, “Hear the words of farseeing Biton, as spoken through his Sibyl at Ikos.” He repeated the prophetic verse just as the Sibyl had given it to him, then went on, “Can any of you doubt that in this verse the god shows Duren to be the rightful successor to Ricolf the Red?”

  His own men clapped and cheered; they were ready to believe his interpretation. Three out of four of Ricolf’s leading vassals, though, had disputed it. What would the common soldiers from Ricolf’s holding do? They owed Gerin no allegiance, but they did not stand to lose so much as Authari and his colleagues, either: who the overlord of the holding was mattered less to men who had to take orders regardless of that overlord’s name.

  And, by ones and twos, they began to nod, accepting that the verse meant what he said it did. They showed no great enthusiasm, but they had no reason to show great enthusiasm: Duren was an untried youth. But they seemed willing to give him his chance.

  Ricolf’s vassal barons saw that, too. Ratkis took it in stride. Whatever Authari thought, he kept to himself. Wacho and Hilmic tried with indifferent success to hide dismay.

  “I thank you,” Duren said to the soldiers, doing his best to pitch his voice man-deep. “May we be at peace whenever we can, and may we win whenever we must go to war.”

  Van stuck an elbow in Gerin’s ribs. “Have to be careful with that one,” he said under his breath, pointing to the Fox’s son. “Whatever he wants, he’s liable to go out and grab it.”

  “Aye,” Gerin said, also looking at Duren with some bemusement. His own nature was to wait and look around before acting, then strike hard. Duren was moving faster and, by the way things seemed, able to be gentler because of that.

  For Ricolf’s troopers were nodding at his words, accepting them more readily than they had Gerin’s interpretation of the oracular response. Before the Fox could say anything, Duren went on, “I will not take up this holding from my grandfather now, for my father still has need of me. But when that need has passed, I will return here and accept the homage of my vassals.”

  Gerin wondered how the troopers would take that; it reminded them of Duren’s link to him. By their anxious expressions, Hilmic and Wacho were wondering the same thing, and hoping the reminder would turn the warriors against Duren. It didn’t. If anything, it made them think better of him. One comment rising above the general murmur of approval was, “If he looks out for his kinsfolk, he’ll look out for us, too.”

  The Fox didn’t know who’d said that, altogether without being asked. He would gladly have paid good gold to get one of Ricolf’s men to come out with such a sentiment; getting it for free, and sincerely, was all the better.

  Ratkis looked satisfied. Authari Broken-Tooth’s expression could have meant anything, though if it betokened delight, Gerin would have been very much surprised. What Hilmic’s and Wacho’s faces showed was at best dyspepsia, at worst stark dismay. The Fox knew they—and probably Authari, too—would be haranguing their retainers every day till Gerin got back to Ricolf’s holding. How much good that haranguing would do them remained to be seen.

  Then Ratkis got down from his chariot and went to one knee on the stone slabs of the road close by the car Duren was driving. Looking up at Duren, he said, “Lord, in token of your return, I will gladly give you homage and fealty now.” He pressed the palms of his hands together and held them out before him.

  At last, after seeing so much maturity from his son, Gerin found Duren at a loss. He tapped the youth on the shoulder and hissed, “Accept, quick!”

  That got Duren moving. He’d seen Gerin accept new vassals often enough to know the ritual. Scrambling down from the chariot, he hurried over to stand in front of Ratkis Bronzecaster and set his hands on those of the older man.

  Ratkis said, “I own myself to be your vassal, Duren son of Gerin the Fox, grandson of Ricolf the Red, and give you the whole of my faith against all men who might live or die.”

  “I, Duren, son of Gerin the Fox, grandson of Ricolf the Red, accept your homage, Ratkis Bronzecaster,” Duren replied solemnly, “and pledge in my turn always to use you justly. In token of whi
ch, I raise you up now.” He helped Ratkis to his feet and kissed him on the cheek.

  “By Dyaus the father of all and Biton the farseeing one, I swear my fealty to you, lord Duren,” Ratkis said, his voice loud and proud.

  “By Dyaus and Biton,” Duren said, “I accept your oath and swear in turn to reward your loyalty with my own.” He looked to Ricolf’s other leading vassals. “Who else will give me this sign of good faith now?”

  Authari Broken-Tooth went to one knee more smoothly than Ratkis had. He too gave Duren homage and then fealty. So far as Gerin could see, the ceremony was flawless in every regard, with no error of form to let Authari claim it was invalid. He was glad Authari had subordinated himself, but trusted the vassal baron no more on account of that.

  Everyone looked at Hilmic and Wacho. Wacho’s fair face turned red. “I’m not pledging anything to a lord who isn’t here to give back what he pledges to me,” he said loudly. Turning to Gerin, he went on, “I don’t reject him out of hand, lord prince; don’t take me wrong. But I won’t give homage and swear fealty till he comes back here to stay, if I do it then. I’ll have to see what he looks like when he’s here for good.” Hilmic Barrelstaves, perhaps encouraged that Wacho had spoken, nodded emphatic agreement.

  Again, Duren handled matters before Gerin could speak: “That is your right. But when I do return, I’ll bear in mind everything you’ve done since the day my grandfather died.”

  Neither Hilmic nor Wacho answered that. Several of Ricolf’s men spoke up in approval, though, and even Wacho’s driver looked back over his shoulder to say something quiet to him. Whatever it was, it made the vassal baron go redder yet and growl something pungent by way of reply.

  Gerin caught Duren’s eye and nodded for him to get back into the chariot. He didn’t want to give his son orders now, not when the boy—no, the young man—had so impressed Ricolf’s followers with his independence. Duren had impressed the Fox, too, a great deal. You never really knew whether someone could swim till he found himself in water over his head.