Werenight

by Turtledove, Harry

  A strange pause followed; neither side could quite believe Balamung had truly perished. Gerin’s men in Fox Keep recovered first. Shouting, “The Fox! The Fox!” they battered their way through the dismayed Trokmoi at the breach and rushed toward the baron and his few remaining comrades. The woodsrunners scattered before them.

  Drago the Bear took Gerin in an embrace that hurt even through armor. Right behind him were Rollan, Simrin Widin’s son, and most of the borderer crew. They were thinner and dirtier than the Fox remembered, but still men to be reckoned with, and happier than he had ever seen them.

  Gerin had hoped their onslaught, coupled with the death of the wizard at his moment of triumph, would send the Trokmoi fleeing for the Niffet. But a northern chieftain stopped the rout before it began. He cut down with his own hand a barbarian running past him. “Are we men or snot-nosed weans?” he roared. “It’s but southrons we’re fighting, not gods. They bleed and they die—and it’s not many of ’em are left to be killed!”

  The Trokmoi sensed the truth in his words. So, with sinking heart, did the Fox. Though magic had failed the barbarians, edged bronze might yet suffice. “We haven’t enough men to fight in the open here. Back to the castle before they cut us off,” he commanded. “Keep the best order you can.”

  Drago began to protest. He looked from the regrouping barbarians to the white scar over Gerin’s eye and thought better of it. For the first hundred yards or so, the retreat went smoothly. Then the Trokmoi gave a hoarse cheer and charged.

  Direct as always, Van went straight for the northern leader, reasoning that his death might kill the spirit he’d given his men. But not even the outlander’s might let him bull his way through the Trokmoi. Their noble commander declined combat. Like few barbarians Gerin knew, he was aware he had more value for his band than his sword-arm alone.

  The baron and his men were within the shadow of the palisade when Rihwin swore and fell, an arrow through his calf. An axe-wielding Trokmê leaped in for the kill. Though prone, Rihwin turned the first stroke with his shield. Before the woodsrunner could make a second, Drago speared him in the side. Gerin’s burly vassal slung Rihwin over his shoulder like a sack of turnips. He ran for the breach with the rest of the Elabonians.

  Thus, through the gap torn in the palisade, Gerin re-entered Fox Keep, the outbuildings afire before him, the Trokmoi hard on his heels. Cursing the noble who had rallied the northerners, he shouted for pike-men to hold the gap.

  The barbarians outside the keep listened to the passionate oratory of their self-appointed leader. With much argument and wasted motion, they formed a ragged line of battle. “At ’em!” the noble cried. Now he led the charge himself.

  Arrows and javelins took their toll of the onrushing barbarians, but they did not waver. They slammed into the thin line the Fox had built against them.

  Spear and shield, sword and corselet kept them out. Van was everywhere at once, smiting like a man possessed, bellowing out a battle-song in the twittering tongue of the plains. He hurled his spear at the leader of the woodsrunners and cursed foully when he missed.

  He took out his rage on the Trokmoi nearest him. Blood dribbled down the leather-wound handle of his mace and glued it to his hand. As always, Gerin fought a more wily fight, but he was in the front line, his left-handed style giving more than one woodsrunner a fatal half-second of confusion.

  When at last the Trokmoi sullenly pulled out of weapon-range, though, Gerin realized how heavy his losses had been. Simrin Widin’s son was on his knees, clutching at an arrow driven through his cuirass into his belly. Fandor the Fat lay dead behind him, along with far too many others. Almost everyone who could still wield a weapon was at the breach, and almost everyone bore at least one wound.

  Shouts of alarm came from the watchtower and two sides of the palisade. “Ladders! Ladders!” The few defenders still on the wall raced to the threatened spots. One ladder, another, went over with a crash, but already red-mustached barbarians were on the walkway. They fought to hold off the Elabonians until their comrades could scale the wall for the final, surely victorious assault on Fox Keep.

  Gerin knew such weariness as he had never felt before. He had endured the terrors of the werenight, slain a wizard more deadly than the world had known for a score of centuries … for what? An extra hour of life. Merely for the lack of a few men, his holding would fall despite all he had done. A double-bladed throwing axe hurled from the walkway flashed past him. It buried itself in the blood-soaked ground.

  But instead of pressing home their attack, the Trokmoi cried out in despair and fear. The Fox’s troopers shouted in sudden desperate urgency. The barbarians on the wall fled back to their scaling-ladders and scrambled down them, trying to reach ground outside the keep before its defenders sent their escape routes toppling.

  Bewildered, the baron looked south and saw the most unlikely rescue force conceivable thundering toward Fox Keep. Wolfar of the Axe, in man’s shape once more, still had with him a good third of the two-hundred-man army he had led before the werenight. Gerin more than half expected Wolfar’s men to ignore the Trokmoi and attack him, but they stormed down on the barbarians, the bloodthirsty baron at their head.

  The Trokmê noble tried to rally his men yet again. Wolfar rode him down. At his fall, the woodsrunners broke and ran, flying in all directions. They had already taken one assault from the rear, and had kept their courage after Balamung died just as his triumph seemed assured. Now courage failed them. They threw away weapons to flee the faster. Most ran for the Niffet, and most never reached it, for Wolfar’s warriors fought with savagery to match their overlord’s.

  Gerin did not let his men join the pursuit. He kept them drawn up in battle array at the breach, unable to believe his long-time enemy would not try to deal with him next. Their numbers were near even, though Wolfar’s men were fresher. But when Wolfar returned from the killing-ground, he and his vassal Schild stepped over the contorted bodies of the Trokmoi who had died before the palisade to approach Fox Keep unarmed.

  “I ought to cut your liver out, Fox,” Wolfar said by way of greeting, “but I find I have reason to let you live.”

  The notion galled Wolfar so badly, he could go no further. Schild spoke for his chief, over whom he towered—he was as tall and lean as Wolfar was short and stocky, and was one of the few men serving under Wolfar whom Gerin respected. He said, “As you can guess, once we pulled ourselves together after whatever madness struck last night”—Gerin started to explain the werenight, but decided it could wait—“we came north after you. But a little south of here, we caught a woodsrunner fleeing your keep. He told us you’d killed their wizard, the one you warned me of not long ago. Is it true?”

  “Aye, it’s true. Dearly bought, but true.”

  “Then you’ve earned your worthless life,” Wolfar said, looking toward the corpse of the demon Duin had killed. It was already starting to stink. “You’ve done a great thing, damn you, and I suppose I have to let it cancel what’s between us from the past.” He started to offer Gerin his hand, but could not bring himself to do it. The Fox knew there was still no liking or trust between them.

  That was not so of their men—soldiers from both sides broke ranks to fraternize. In their shared victory over Balamung and the Trokmoi, they forgot the enmity that had existed between them. Though he did not want to do it, Gerin felt he had no choice but to invite Wolfar and his troops to help man Castle Fox and make it defensible once more.

  To the baron’s secret disappointment, Wolfar accepted at once. “A holding with too few soldiers in it is almost worse than none at all,” he said. “I worry about my own keep; the men I left behind rattle around in it like dried beans in a gourd—do they not, Schild?”

  “Hmm?” Schild gave him an unclassifiable look. “Aye, my lord, the garrison there is very small indeed.”

  As Wolfar’s men filed into the holding, Gerin assigned them duties: some to the palisade, others to help some of his own men plug the breach, still
others to help the wounded or fight the fires still flickering in the outbuildings. Wolfar did not object to his dispositions. He seemed content to let the Fox keep overall command inside Fox Keep.

  Gerin was glad to find that Rihwin’s injury was not serious. “You’re not hamstrung, and the arrow went clear through your leg. Otherwise we’d have to cut it out, which is nothing to be taken lightly,” the baron told him. “As is, though, you should heal before long.”

  “If I put spikes on my wrists and ankles, do you think I’ll be able to climb trees like a cat?” Rihwin asked, adjusting his bandage.

  “I see no reason why not.”

  “Odd,” Rihwin murmured. “I never could before.”

  “Go howl!” Gerin threw his hands in the air and went off to see to other injured men. If the southerner could joke at his wound, he would soon mend.

  Had they taken place at any other time, Gerin would have reckoned the next days among the most hectic of his life. As if was, they scarcely stood comparison to what had gone before.

  True, four days after Balamung’s fall, the Trokmê chieftain who had turned longtooth in the werenight led an attack on Fox Keep. By then, though, the breach in the palisade was repaired, and the holding had fresh supplies drawn from the countryside. Nor did the woodsrunner have patience for a siege. He tried to storm the walls, and was bloodily repulsed. He himself jumped from a scaling ladder to the palisade walkway. Wolfar took his head with a single stroke of the heavy axe that gave him his sobriquet.

  Then the ladder went crashing over. Half a dozen Trokmoi tried to leap clear as it fell. The ladders that stayed upright long enough for the barbarians to come to grips with the Elabonians were few. After their leader was slain inside the keep, they lost their eagerness for the fight.

  In a way, that second attack by the Trokmoi was a gift from the gods. It further united Wolfar’s men and Gerin’s against a common foe, and again reminded them how petty their old disputes were now. A good lesson, Gerin thought. He regretted that the province north of the Kirs had not learned it sooner.

  Wolfar, surprisingly, seemed to take the lesson to heart. He did not much try to hide his animosity toward Gerin, but he did not let it interfere with the running of the keep. He never mentioned Elise. He was as cordial as his nature allowed toward the baron’s men, and insisted on praising Fox Keep’s ale, though by now it was coming from the barrel-bottom and full of yeast.

  Gerin would sooner have seen him surly. He did not know how to react to this new Wolfar.

  For Schild, on the other hand, his admiration grew by leaps and bounds. When the Fox learned from a prisoner of a band of Trokmoi planning to raft over the Niffet, Wolfar’s lieutenant led a joint raiding party to ambush the barbarians as they disembarked. The ambush was a great success. The Trokmoi paddled back across the river after leaving a double handful of men dead on the shore.

  On the raiders’ return, Wolfar was so lavish in their praise and so affable that Gerin’s suspicion of him redoubled. But beyond this uncharacteristic warmth, the thick-shouldered baron as yet showed no hint of what was in his mind.

  “He’s given me every reason to trust him,” Gerin told Van one night, “and I trust him less than ever.”

  “Probably just as well for you,” Van said. Gerin was not sorry to find his worries shared.

  Word of Balamung’s death spread quickly. It raised the Elabonians’ spirits but disheartened their foes, who had leaned on the wizard’s supposed invincibility. Two days after the defeat Schild had engineered for the band of southbound barbarians, a large troop of Trokmoi came north past Castle Fox. Except for keeping out of bowshot, they ignored the keep, intent on returning with their booty to the cool green forests north of the Niffet.

  Another large band came by a day later, and another two days after that. As if the appearance of the third group of retreating Trokmoi had been some sort of signal, Wolfar stumped up to the Fox in the great hall and said abruptly, “Time we talked.”

  Whatever Wolfar had been hiding, it was about to come into the open. Of that Gerin felt sure. Stifling his apprehension, he said, “As you wish. The library is quiet.” He led his western neighbor up the stairs.

  Wolfar seemed less disconcerted by his strange surroundings than Gerin had hoped. “What a bastardly lot of books you have, Fox!” he said. “Where did you pick them all up?”

  “Here and there. Some I brought back from the southlands, some I’ve got since, a few came from my father, and a couple I just stole.”

  “Mmm,” Wolfar said. Then he fell silent, leaning back in his chair.

  At last Gerin said, “You said you wanted to talk, Wolfar. What’s on your mind?”

  “You don’t know, Fox?” Wolfar sounded honestly surprised.

  “If it’s Elise, she won’t marry you, you know. She’d sooner bed a real wolf.”

  “As if what she wanted had anything to do with it. Still, she’s only a—what word do I need?—a detail, maybe.”

  “Go on.” Now Gerin was genuinely alarmed. This cold-blooded calculator was not the Wolfar he had expected, save in his utter disregard for anyone else. The Fox wanted to keep him talking until he had some idea of what he was dealing with.

  “I’d thought better of you, Gerin. We don’t get along, but I know you’re no fool. You have no excuse for being stone blind.”

  “Go on,” Gerin said again, wishing Wolfar would come to a point.

  “All right. On this stretch of the border, we have the only two major holdings that didn’t fall. Now tell me, what aid did we get from the Marchwarden of the North or our lord Emperor Hildor?” Wolfar tried to put mockery in his voice, but managed only a growl.

  “Less than nothing, as well I know.”

  “How right you are. Fox, you can see as well as I—better, I suppose, if you’ve really read all these books—the Empire hasn’t done a damned thing for us the past hundred years. Enough, by all the gods! With the confusion on the border—and deep inside, too, from some of the things you’ve said—the two of us could be princes so well established that, by the time Elabon moved its fat arse against us, we’d be impossible to throw out, you and I!”

  No wonder Wolfar had changed, Gerin thought, whistling softly. Anyone carrying that big an idea on his shoulders would change, and might buckle under the strain of it. Something else bothered the Fox too, but he could not place it. “What would you have us be princes of?” he asked. “Our side of the border is so weak the Trokmoi can come down as they wish, with or without their wizard. For now, we can’t hope to hold them.”

  “Think, though. We can channel their force into whatever shape pleases us. Save for them, we’re the only powers on the border now, and we can use them against whoever stands against us.”

  That idea Gerin liked not at all. He wanted to drive every woodsrunner back across the Niffet, not import more as mercenaries. He said, “After a while, they’d decided they’d sooner not be used, and act for their own benefit, not ours.”

  “With their sorcerer gone, they could never hurt us, so long as we kept up enough properly manned and alert keeps,” Wolfar argued. His elaborate calm worried Gerin more than any bluster or nervousness.

  But at last he had it, the thing Wolfar was trying to hide. The blank look Schild had given his overlord, a few odd remarks from Wolfar’s men … everything fell together. “Wolfar,” he asked, “what were you doing on my land, away from your properly manned and alert keep, when you ran into me just before the werenight?”

  “What do you mean?” Wolfar’s deep-set eyes were intent on Gerin.

  “Just this: you’ve tried to bury me in a haystack without my noticing. It almost worked, I grant you—you’re more subtle than I thought.”

  “You’ll have to make yourself plainer, Fox. I can’t follow your riddles.”

  “Very well, I’ll be perfectly clear. You, sir, are a liar of the first water, and staking everything on your lie not being found out. Your keep must have been sacked, and almost at once, or you�
��d still be in it, not trotting over the landscape like a frog with itchy breeches. In fact, you’re as homeless as a cur without a master.”

  Wolfar took a long, slow breath. “Reasoned like a schoolmaster, Fox. But your logic fails you at the end.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  Heavy muscles rippled under Wolfar’s tunic. “I do have a home keep, you see: this one.” He hurled himself at Gerin.

  The Fox sprang from his seat and threw a footstool at Wolfar’s head. Wolfar knocked it aside with a massive forearm. Like a crushing snake, he reached out for the Fox. In the first moment of fighting, neither man thought to draw sword. Their hatred, suppressed these past few days, blazed up out of control, too hot for anything but flesh against flesh, Gerin mad as Wolfar.

  Then Wolfar kicked the Fox in the knee. He staggered back, hearing someone shriek and realizing it was himself. The bright pain cut through his bloodlust. When Wolfar roared forward to finish him, he almost spitted himself on Gerin’s blade.

  His own was out the next instant. Sparks flew as bronze struck bronze. Wolfar used his sword as if it were an axe, hacking and chopping, but he was so quick and strong Gerin had no time for a telling riposte. His movement hampered by his knee, he stayed on the defensive, awaiting opportunity.

  It came, finally: a clever thrust, a twist of the wrist, and Wolfar’s blade and one finger went flying across the room. But before the Fox could pierce him, Wolfar kicked the sword from his hand and seized him in a pythonic embrace.

  Gerin felt his ribs creak. He slammed the heel of his hand against Wolfar’s nose, snapping his head back. In the capital they claimed that was often a fatal blow, but Wolfar merely grunted under it. Still, his grip loosened for an instant, and Gerin jerked free.

  He wondered briefly what was keeping everyone from bursting into the library and pulling the two of them apart. They were making enough noise to scare the Trokmoi in the woods, let alone the men in the castle. But no one came.