“How do you know it was, if it was only a little snake you killed?” someone asked.
“By the action of the venom,” Van answered. “The seps bit my friend—well, actually, he was a robber and a thief, but we were traveling together—just above the ankle. Half an hour later, the gods beshrew me if I lie, there was nothing left of him but a little puddle of greenish fluid.”
“What?” that same somebody exclaimed. “A snakebite doesn’t do that.”
“I thought the same thing,” Van said, “but I was wrong. The natives at Sirte had told us the seps’ venom made you disappear, and they knew what they were talking about. The fellow’s flesh got clear around the bite, so you could see the bone through it, and then it just melted away, and the bone with it.” He shuddered dramatically. “I never saw a man dissolve before and, if the gods are kind, I’ll never see it again. How he screamed as he watched himself vanish—till he couldn’t scream any more, of course. The rest of us, we pushed on in a hurry, let me tell you, and by the time we got out of there, like I say, he was nothing more than a little, stinking puddle the hot sun was already drying up.
“You can’t blame us for not sticking around the spot where anything that horrible happened, but running away so fast turned out to be a mistake, too, for we didn’t watch where we were putting our feet as carefully as we should have, and one of us stepped right on a prester.
“The thing looked like the vipers they have here, more or less, but when it came writhing out of the sand, it was the color of melted copper. It sank its teeth into poor Nasid—that was his name; it comes back to me even after all these years—then dove back into the sandbank and disappeared before anybody could do anything to it.
“And poor Nasid! Instead of melting, he started to swell, like rising bread dough but a hundred times as fast. His skin turned as fiery red as the prester’s. He looked like there was a storm inside him, puffing him out every which way at once.
“Here’s how fast he blew out: he was wearing trousers and a tunic with buttons, almost Trokmê-style, and the buttons flew right off the tunic, so hard that the one that hit me gave me this little scar over my eye, right here.” The outlander pointed to a mark on his much-battered hide.
Gerin admired that touch. If Van’s stories weren’t true, they should have been, for he adorned them with a wealth of circumstantial detail. “What happened then?” the Fox asked.
“What do you mean?” Van returned. “To Nasid? He exploded, and there was no more left of him than of the other poor devil. To the rest of us? We ran. We probably should have run back to Sirte, but we went on toward the myrrh instead, and actually got to it with nobody else dying on the way. Then we headed up toward the Shanda country, but my other three friends—friends? ha!—tried to kill me for my share of the myrrh, and I left them as dead as anybody a snake bit.”
“And what would the moral o’ the tale be?” Adiatunnus asked. “A fine one it is, but it should have a moral.”
“You want a moral, eh?” Van said. “I’ll give you one. What this story shows is, some things are more trouble than they’re worth.”
The Trokmê chieftain laughed and nodded. “It does that. And a truth worth remembering it is, too.” He glanced up at the moons. “And if you’d gone on much longer, the story’d have been more trouble nor it was worth, with us having to get up in the morning and all. But you didna, for which I thank you.” He laid a blanket on the ground and wrapped himself in it.
Gerin couldn’t resist a parting shot: “Even if you do get up in the morning, will you be moving before afternoon?” Adiatunnus made a point of ignoring him. Chuckling, the Fox also swaddled himself in a blanket and was soon asleep.
Maybe sleeping in the open was what the Trokmoi needed. Maybe they were starting to remember what being on campaign was all about. Whatever the reason, they moved reasonably fast when the sun came up the next morning. Gerin had been looking forward to screaming at them to hurry. Disappointed, he gnawed dry sausage and made sure he was ready to get going so they couldn’t twit him.
The farther west they traveled, the more heavily the unnatural coolth lay on the land. Gerin eyed the fields with curiosity and concern mixed. “They’ll not have much of a crop this year,” he observed.
“Aye, the wheat’s well behind where it ought to be,” Van agreed. “They look like they had to plant late to start with, and they won’t make up for lost time, not with weather like this they won’t” His shiver held only a little exaggeration for dramatic effect.
“Pity you couldn’t have brought one of those prester snakes along with you from Sirte—is that the name of the place?” Gerin said. Van nodded. The Fox went on, “Sounds like just what we’d need to heat up … a certain goddess I’d be better off not naming.”
Van chuckled and nodded. “Aye, a prester would heat her up if anything would. The thing of it is, would anything?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Gerin answered. “If we beat the Gradi and drive them away, it doesn’t matter, anyhow. Without men and women to worship her, that goddess won’t gain a foothold here.”
He didn’t know whether not naming Voldar would do any good. But he’d been of the opinion that Adiatunnus knew more about the Gradi than he did, and the Trokmê chief had given him no reason to change his mind. If Adiatunnus thought saying Voldar’s name would draw her notice, the Fox was willing to refrain.
He wished, though, that he could draw the notice of the local barons by speaking their names. Many of them seemed to have abandoned their keeps, though the Gradi didn’t seem to be garrisoning those keeps, either. Some of the serf villages looked deserted, too. Again, Gerin saw the delicate fabric of civilization tearing.
He sent scouts out farther ahead and to either side than he was used to doing. He also maintained a substantial rearguard: the Gradi, with their ability to travel down rivers, were liable to try to set troops behind him and pin him between two forces. He would have thought about doing that had he been in their place, anyhow.
As his army advanced through country that lay ever deeper in the frigid embrace of the Gradi gods, he wished he could come to grips with the Gradi themselves. He began to worry when he encountered none of them, and started complaining shortly thereafter.
When he did, Van fixed him with a gaze that might have belonged on a battlefield itself and said, “We’ll come across them soon enough, and when we do, you’ll be wishing just as loud you’d never set eyes on them.” Since that was undoubtedly true, the Fox maintained what he thought was a prudent silence. Van’s snicker said it might have been less prudent than he’d hoped.
And then, a couple of days later, the army did come upon a troop of Gradi; the invaders were happily plundering a peasant village. They’d killed a couple of men, and a line of them were having sport with a woman they’d caught. They seemed utterly astonished to find foes so far into territory they obviously thought of as theirs. As some of them were literally caught with their breeches down, they put up a fight less ferocious than they might have otherwise, and several made no effort to slay themselves rather than submitting to capture.
Gerin ordered the men who’d been holding down the peasant woman and the one who’d been on top of her bound and handed over to the surviving serfs. “Do as you like with them,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll think of something interesting.”
The peasants’ eyes glowed. “Let’s get a fire going,” one of them said.
“Aye, and we’ll boil some water over it,” another added enthusiastically.
“Will we want sharp knives—or dull ones?” somebody asked.
“Both,” said the woman who’d been raped. “I claim first cut, and I know just where I’m going to make it, too.” She stared at the crotch of one of the Gradi with an interest anything but lewd. Gerin couldn’t tell whether any of the bound Gradi understood Elabonian. They might not know what was in store for them. He shrugged. If they didn’t, they’d find out soon enough.
One of the other no
rtherners did speak the language of the land they’d invaded. “I not tell you anything,” he said when Gerin started to question him.
“Fine,” the Fox said. He turned to the warriors holding the captives. “Take him where he can watch the serfs at work. If he doesn’t come back talkier after that, we’ll give him to them, too.”
“Come on, you,” one of the Elabonians said. They frogmarched the Gradi away. Before long, the Fox heard hoarse screams rising up from inside the village. When the guards brought the Gradi back, his face was paler than it had been. The guards looked grim, too.
“Hello again,” Gerin said briskly. He looked thoughtful, a look he’d had occasion to practice over the years. “Do you suppose your goddess would be interested in keeping you around for the afterlife if you end up dead with some interesting parts missing? Do you suppose you’d enjoy the afterlife as much if you didn’t have them? Do you want to find out the answers to those questions right away?”
The Gradi licked his lips. He didn’t answer right away; maybe he was taking stock of his own spirit. Dying in battle, even slaying yourself to avoid capture, seemed easy if you measured them against mutilation that would be long agony in this world and might ruin you for the next.
Gerin smiled. “Are you more in the mood to talk now than you were a little while ago? For your sake, you’d better be.”
“How I know I talk, then you do things to me anyway?” the Gradi asked.
“How do you know you can trust me, you mean? That’s simple—you don’t. Nothing complicated there, eh? But I tell you now that I won’t do all those interesting things to you if you do talk. You can believe me or not, as you choose.”
The Gradi sighed. “I talk. What you want?”
“For starters, tell me your name,” Gerin said.
“I am Eistr.”
“Eistr.” Gerin found a stick and wrote the name in Elabonian characters in the soft ground at his feet. “Now that I know it and have captured it here, I can work magic against it—and against you—if I find out you lie.”
Eistr looked appalled. Gerin had hoped he would. Nothing the Fox had seen made him think the Gradi knew the use of writing. Literacy was thin enough among Elabonians, and almost nonexistent among the Trokmoi, who, when they did write, used the characters of their southern neighbors. Ignorance added to Eistr’s fear. And the truth was that Gerin, if sufficiently ired, might even have been able to use name magic against him, though it wasn’t anything the Fox really wanted to try.
“You ask. I tell,” the Gradi said. “I tell true, swear by Voldar’s breasts.”
Gerin had no idea how strong an oath that was, but decided not to press it. He said, “Where did your band come from? How many more of you are back there?”
Eistr pointed back toward the west. “Is keep, two days’ walk from here. Is by a river. We have maybe ten tens when I there. Is maybe more now. Is maybe not more, too.”
The Fox thought that over. It struck him as a likely way to get his army to walk into a trap without leaving Eistr forsworn. Gerin said, “Why don’t you know how many men of yours are likely to be in this keep now?”
“We use for—how you say?—for middle place. Some go out to fight, some come in to fight, some stay to mind thralls,” Eistr said. “Is now many, is now not.”
“Ah.” That did make a certain amount of sense. “Is your band supposed to be back at this base at any set time, or do you come and go as you please?”
“As we please. We are Gradi. We are free. The goddess Voldar rules us, no man.” Pride rang in Eistr’s voice.
“You may be surprised,” the Fox said dryly. Eistr’s cold, gray eyes stared at him without comprehension. Gerin turned to the guards. “Take him away. We’ll find out what some of the others can tell us.”
He got pretty much the same story from the rest of the Gradi who spoke Elabonian. Then he had to figure out what to do with them. Killing them out of hand would have meant having the same thing happen to any of his men the Gradi captured. Holding them prisoner would have made him detach men from his own force to guard them, which he didn’t think he could afford to do. In the end, he decided to strip them naked and turn them loose.
“But these thralls, they catch us, they kill us,” Eistr protested, he being the most articulate of the Gradi. He glanced nervously toward the peasant village.
“You know, maybe you should have thought about that before you started robbing and raping and killing them,” Gerin said.
“But they ours. We do with them how we like,” Eistr answered. “Voldar has said, so must be true.” The other Gradi who followed Elabonian nodded agreement to that.
“Voldar isn’t the only goddess—or god—in this land, and people here have more sway on their own than you’re used to,” the Fox said. As if to add emphasis to his words, another scream came from one of the raiders he’d given over to the serfs. He blinked in surprise; he’d thought those Gradi surely dead by now. The peasants had more patience and ingenuity than he’d given them credit for. He finished, “Now you’re going to find out what it’s like being rabbits instead of wolves. If you live, you’ll learn something from it.”
“And if you don’t live, you’ll learn summat from that, too,” Van added with ghoulish glee.
When ordered to strip bare, one of the captured Gradi, though weaponless, threw himself at Elabonians and Trokmoi and fought so fiercely, he made them kill him. The rest looked much less fearsome without jerkins and helms and heavy leather boots. They ran for the woods, white buttocks flashing in the sun.
“They have no tools for making fire,” Gerin observed, “nor weapons to hunt beasts for sacrifices to the night ghosts. They’ll have a thin time of it when the sun goes down.” He smiled unpleasantly. “Good.”
He gave the helms and shields and axes he’d taken from the Gradi to the men of the peasant village. He didn’t know how much good they would do folk untrained to war, but was certain they couldn’t hurt. Some of the villagers were still busy with the captive Gradi. He did his best not to look at what was left of the arrogant raiders.
He did say, “When you’re done there, find someplace to be rid of the bodies so the Gradi never find them. For that matter, if you get word we’ve lost, you probably ought to think about running for your lives.”
“You won’t lose, lord prince,” one of the serfs exclaimed. “You can’t.”
Gerin wished he shared the fellow’s touching optimism.
The Fox pushed the pace as his force of chariotry approached the keep the Gradi were holding. He didn’t want any of the men he’d released deciding to act heroic and getting there ahead of his warriors to warn the garrison. Taking a keep was hard enough without having the foe alerted in advance.
One thing: the Gradi seemed to have no idea he and his troopers were anywhere nearby. To make sure they didn’t, on his approach he sent out dismounted scouts, who, if they were seen, were likely to be taken for either Gradi or for Elabonian peasants. The scouts came back with word that, sure enough, the Gradi did hold the keep, but that they had the drawbridge down and were keeping no watch worth mentioning.
“Why don’t we just march up on foot and tramp right in, then?” the Fox said. “With luck, they won’t notice we aren’t who we’re supposed to be till it’s too late to raise the drawbridge against us.”
“What, and leave the cars behind?” Adiatunnus demanded.
“We can’t fight with them inside the keep anyhow, can we?” Gerin said. The Trokmê chieftain scratched his head, then shrugged, plainly not having looked at it that way. Gerin said, “They’ve got us here faster than we could have come on foot, and we’re not worn out from walking, either. They’ve served their purpose, but you can’t use the same tool for every job.”
“Ah, well,” Adiatunnus said. “I told you I’d follow against the Gradi where you led, and if you’ll be after leading with the feet of you, I’ll walk in your footsteps, that I will.” His eyes, though, said something more like, And if this goes wr
ong, I’ll blame you for it, that I will.
That was the chance you took in any battle, though: if you lost, you got the blame, assuming you lived. Actually, you could get the blame if you died, too, but then you had other things to worry about.
The Fox told off approximately equal numbers of Elabonians and Trokmoi to stay behind with the horses. As for the rest, he put those who in looks and equipment most closely resembled the Gradi at the head of the column, to confuse the warriors in the keep for as long as he could. Being dark haired himself, with gear of the plainest, he marched along at the fore.
Van, who with his blond hair and fancy cuirass resembled almost anything in the world more than a Gradi, was relegated to the rear, to his loud disgust. He complained so long and so bitterly, Gerin finally snapped, “I’m getting better obedience out of the Trokmoi than I am from you.”
“Oh, I’ll do it, Fox,” the outlander said with a mournful sigh, “but you can drop me into the hottest of your five hells if you think you’ll make me like it.”
“So long as it gets done,” Gerin said. He wished he’d been able to find an excuse to hold Duren back at the rear. If both of them fell, all his hopes would fall, too—not, again, that he’d be in a position to do anything about it.
He led the column of warriors on a looping track to bring them up to the keep from the south, figuring the Gradi were less likely to take alarm if he and his men didn’t come into view from straight out of the east. “We’ll get as close to the keep as we can,” he said, “and then charge home. If enough of us can get inside, they’ll be very unhappy.”
“And if not enough can,” somebody—he didn’t see who—said, “we will.” Since that was undoubtedly true, he wasted no time arguing about it.
His first view of the keep confirmed the scouts’ reports and his own hopes. The Gradi had only a handful of men up on the walls. Several more were passing time outside, a couple going at each other with axe and shield, three or four more standing around watching.
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