Werenight

by Turtledove, Harry

  He suspected the mage of deliberately requiring the left hand for the complex passes to make the spell more difficult, but grinned as he incanted: being left-handed himself, he was delighted to have his clumsy right doing something simple.

  The painting and passes done, he snatched up the sword and cried, “Let the wishes of the operator be accomplished!”

  For a moment, he wondered if anything would happen. A lot of alleged grimoires were frauds; maybe that was why this one had sat unused on a shelf for a couple of generations. But then, sure enough, yellow-orange flames rippled up and down the length of the blade. They neither looked nor smelled like burning butter; they seemed more the essence of fire brought down to earth.

  “That’s marvelous,” Rihwin breathed as Gerin made cut-and-thrust motions with the flaming sword. “It—”

  With a sudden foul oath, Gerin rammed the sword into the bucket of water. A hiss and a cloud of steam arose; to his great relief, the flames went out. He cautiously felt the water with a forefinger. When he discovered it remained cool, he stuck in his hand. “Cursed hilt got too hot to hold,” he explained to a pop-eyed Rihwin. “Oh, that feels good.”

  “Which, no doubt, is the reason we fail to find blazing blades closely clenched in the fierce fist of every peerless paladin,” Rihwin answered. “Many a spell that seems superb on the leaves of a codex develops disqualifying drawbacks when actually essayed.”

  “You’re right about that,” Gerin answered, drying his hand on the thigh of his baggy wool breeches. Everyone in the northlands wore trousers; the Trokmê style had conquered completely. Even Rihwin, who had favored southern robes, was in breeches these days. Gerin inspected his left palm. “I don’t think that’s going to blister.”

  “Smear butter or tallow on it if it does,” Rihwin said, “but not the, ah, heated mixture you prepared there.”

  “With the poison oak leaves and all? No, I’ll get rid of that.” Gerin poured it out of its clay pot onto the ground. After a bit of thought, he scooped dirt onto the greasy puddle. If the sole of his boot happened to have a hole, he didn’t want the stuff getting onto his skin.

  He and Rihwin left the shack. Shadows were lengthening; before long, no one would want to stay outdoors. Ghosts filled the night with terror. A man caught alone in the darkness without sacrificial blood to propitiate them or fire to hold them at bay was likely to be mad come morning.

  Gerin glanced to the sky, gauging the hour by the moons. Nothos’ pale crescent hung a little west of south; golden Math, at first quarter looking like half a coin, was about as far to the east. And ruddy Elleb (pinkish white now, washed out by the late afternoon sun), halfway between quarter and full, stood well clear of the eastern horizon. The fourth moon, quick-moving Tiwaz, would be a waning crescent when the serfs went out to work just after sunrise tomorrow.

  As if Gerin’s thinking of the serfs he ruled had brought them to new life, a mournful horn blew in the village close by Fox Keep, calling men and women in from the fields.

  Gerin looked at the moons again, raised one eyebrow in a characteristic gesture. “They’re knocking off early today,” he remarked. “I think I may have to speak to the headman tomorrow.”

  “He’ll not love you for making him push the other peasants harder,” Rihwin said.

  Who does love me, for any reason? Gerin wondered. His mother had died giving birth to him; maybe because of that, his father had always been distant. Or maybe his father simply hadn’t known what to do when he got himself a thinker instead of a brawler.

  His son Duren loved him, aye, but now it was his turn to have trouble returning that love, because whenever he saw Duren, he thought of Elise. She’d loved him for a while, until passion cooled … and then just disappeared, with only a note left behind begging him not to go after her. It was, in fact, very much the way she’d fled with him from her father’s keep.

  He didn’t feel like going into any of that with Rihwin. Instead, he answered, “I don’t care whether Besant Big-Belly loves me or not.” That, at least, was true. “I do care that we grow enough to get through the winter, for if we don’t, Besant will be big-bellied no more.”

  “He would say, did he dare, that all the peasants would be bigger-bellied did they not have to pay you a fourth of what they raised,” Rihwin observed.

  “He could say it to my face, and well he knows it,” Gerin returned. “I’m not a lord who makes serfs into draft animals that happen to walk on two legs, nor do I take the half some barons squeeze from them. But if I took nothing, who would ward them from the chariot-riding wolves who’d swoop down on them?”

  He waited for Rihwin to say something like, “They could do it for themselves.” He was ready to pour scorn on that idea like boiling water splashing down from the top of a palisade onto the heads of attackers. Farmers didn’t have the tools they needed to be fighters: the horses, the chariots, the swords, the armor. Nor did they have the time they needed to learn to use those tools; the endless rhythms of fields and livestock devoured their days.

  But Rihwin said, “My fellow Fox, sometimes you don’t know when you’re being twitted.”

  Denied his chance to rend Rihwin with rhetoric, Gerin glared. He walked around to the front of the castle. Rihwin tagged along, chuckling. As they went inside, another horn sounded from a more distant village, and then another almost at the edge of hearing. Gerin said, “You see? If one village knocks off early, they all do it, for they hear the first horn and blow their own, figuring they don’t want to work any harder than the fellows down the trail.”

  “Who does like to work?” Rihwin said.

  “No one with sense,” Gerin admitted, “but no one with sense will avoid doing what he must to stay alive. The trouble is, not all men are sensible, even by that standard.”

  “If you think I’ll argue with that, you’re the one who’s not sensible,” Rihwin said.

  The great hall of the castle occupied most of the ground floor. A fire roared in the stone hearth at the far end, and another, smaller, one in front of the altar to Dyaus close by. Above the hearth, cooks basted chunks of beef as they turned them on spits. Fat-wrapped thighbones, the god’s portion, smoked on the altar. Gerin believed in feeding the god well; moreover, after his brush with Mavrix, he figured he could use all the divine protection he could get.

  Two rows of benches ran from the doorway to the hearth. In winter, seats closest to the fire were the choice ones. Now, with the weather mild, Gerin sat about halfway down one row. A couple of dogs came trotting through the rushes on the rammed-earth floor and lay at his feet, looking up expectantly.

  “Miserable beggars,” he said, and scratched their ears. “I don’t have any food myself yet, so how can I throw you bones and scraps?” The dogs thumped their tails on the ground. They knew they got fed sooner or later when people sat at those benches. If it had to be later, they would wait.

  Van and Drago the Bear and the other gamblers came in, chattering about the game. Duren frisked among them. When he saw Gerin, he ran over to him, exclaiming, “I rolled the dice a lot, Papa! I rolled double six twice, and five-and-six three times, and—”

  He would have gone down the whole list, but Van broke in, “Aye, and the little rascal rolled one-and-two for me, and sent me out of that round without a tunic to call my own.” He shook a heavy fist at Duren in mock anger. Duren, safe beside his father, stuck out his tongue.

  “The dice go up, the dice go down,” Drago said, shrugging shoulders almost as wide as Van’s. From him, that passed for philosophy. He was a long way from the brightest of Gerin’s vassals, but a good many more clever men managed their estates worse. Since Drago never tried anything new, he discovered no newfangled ways to go wrong.

  Gerin called to one of the cooks, “We have enough here to begin. Fetch ale for us, why don’t you?”

  “Aye, lord prince,” the man answered, and hurried down into the cellar. He returned a moment later, staggering a little under the weight of a heavy jar of ale. The
jar had a pointed bottom. The cook stabbed it into the dirt floor so the jar stood upright. He hurried off again, coming back with a pitcher and a double handful of tarred leather drinking jacks. He set one in front of everybody at the table (Duren got a small one), then dipped the pitcher into the amphora, pouring and refilling until every jack was full.

  “Take some for yourself, too,” Gerin said; he was not a lord who stinted his servants. Grinning, the cook poured what looked like half a pitcher down his throat. Gerin slopped a little ale out of his mug onto the floor. “This for Baivers, god of barley,” he intoned as he drank.

  “This for Baivers,” the others echoed as they poured their libations. Even Van imitated him: though Baivers was no god of the outlander’s, the deity, whose scalp sprouted ears of barley instead of hair, held sway in this land.

  Rihwin made a sour face as he set down the mug. “I miss the sweet blood of the grape,” he said.

  “Point the first: the grape doesn’t grow in the northlands and we’ve lost our trade south of the High Kirs,” Gerin said. “Point the second: when you drink too much wine, dreadful things happen. We’ve seen that again and again. Point the third: wine lies in Mavrix’s province, and have you not had your share and more of commerce with Mavrix?”

  “True, all true,” Rihwin said sadly. “I miss the grape regardless.”

  The cooks came round with bowls of bean-and-parsnip porridge, with tiny bits of salt pork floating in it to give it flavor. Like everyone else, Gerin lifted his bowl to his lips, wiped his mouth on his sleeve when he was done. South of the High Kirs, they had separate squares of cloth for cleaning your face and fingers, but such refinements did not exist north of the mountains.

  Off the spit came the pieces of beef. While one cook carved them into man-sized portions, another went back to the kitchen and came out with round, flat, chewy loaves of bread, which he set in front of each man at the table. They’d soak up the juices from the meat and get eaten in their turn.

  Gerin patted the empty place between Van and him. “Put one here, too, Anseis. Fand is sure to be down before long.”

  “Aye, lord prince,” the cook said, and did as he was asked.

  Duren started tearing pieces from his round of bread and stuffing them into his mouth. Gerin said, “If you fill yourself up with that, boy, where will you find room for your meat?”

  “I’ll put it someplace.” Duren patted his stomach to show the intended destination.

  Just as the cook who was carving the beef started loading steaming gobbets onto an earthenware tray, Fand did come down from Castle Fox’s living quarters into the great hall. Gerin and Van glanced over at each other, smiled for a moment, and then both waved her to that place between them.

  “Och, you’re still not after fighting over me,” she said in mock disappointment as she came up. Beneath the mock disappointment, Gerin judged, lay real disappointment. She might have resigned herself to their peacefully sharing her, but she didn’t like it.

  Hoping to get her off that bloodthirsty turn of thought, Gerin called for a servant to pour her a jack of ale. He handed it to her himself. “Here you are.”

  “I thank you, sure and I do.” Her Elabonian held a strong Trokmê lilt. She was a big, fair woman, not too much shorter than the Fox, with pale skin dusted with freckles wherever the sun caught it, gray-blue eyes, and wavy, copper-colored hair that tumbled past her shoulders. To Gerin, men of that coloring were enemies on sight; he still sometimes found it odd to be sharing a bed with a woman from north of the Niffet.

  Not odd enough to keep me from doing it, though, he thought. Aloud, he said to Fand, “Should I have put you on a boat across the river after all?”

  “’Twould have been your own loss if you had,” she retorted, tossing her head so the torchlight glinted in her hair. One thing she had was unshakeable self-confidence—and why not, when two men such as they danced to her tune?

  Gerin said, “My guess is still that you stuck a knife into the fellow who brought you south over the Niffet.”

  “I’ve told you before, Gerin dear: I brought my own self over, thinking life might be more lively here. Och, and so it has been, not that I reckoned on yoking myself to a southron—” she paused to half turn and make eyes at Van “—let alone two.”

  “I’m no Elabonian,” Van boomed indignantly, “and I’ll thank you not to call me one. One fine day I hitch a team to a chariot or just go off afoot—”

  “How many years have you been saying that?” Gerin asked.

  “As many as I’ve been here, no doubt, less maybe one turn of the fastest moon.” Van shook his head, forever bemused he could stay in one place so long. “A tree, now, has need of growing roots, but a man—?”

  “A man?” Fand said, still trying to stir up trouble. “You’ll quarrel over whether you’re a southron or no, but not over me? What sort of man is that after making you?”

  “You should remember well enough from last night what sort of man I am.” Van looked like a cat that had fallen into the cream pitcher.

  Fand squeaked indignantly and turned back to Gerin. “Will you be letting him speak to me so?”

  “Aye, most likely I will,” he said. If she got fed up and left them both, he’d be sorry for a while, but he knew he’d also be relieved. He didn’t feel like a screaming fight now, though, so he said, “Here comes the meat.”

  That distracted her. It distracted him, too. He drew his dagger from his belt and started carving strips off the bone in front of him and popping them into his mouth.

  The dagger, like the rest of his personal gear, was severely plain, with a hilt of nothing more splendid than leather-wrapped bone. But it had good balance, and he kept the edge sharp; sometimes he used plainness to conceal effectiveness.

  Van, by contrast, had the hilt to his knife wrapped in gold wire, with a big topaz set into the pommel. For him, flamboyance served the same purpose self-effacement did for Gerin: it disguised the true warrior beneath. Being dangerous without seeming so, Gerin had found, made the danger double.

  Thinking thus, he glanced over at Fand, who was slicing with her own slim bronze blade. Was she disguising something? He snorted and took a long pull at his ale. No, concealment wasn’t in her nature. But he’d thought as much about Elise, and where had that got him?

  Duren said, “Papa, will you help me cut more meat?” He had a knife, too, but a small one, and not very sharp. That helped keep him from getting cut, but it also kept him from eating very fast.

  Gerin leaned over and sliced off several strips for him. “Splash water on your face when you’re done,” he said. He remembered how surprised and delighted he’d been to discover the elaborate hot and cold baths the City of Elabon boasted. North of the High Kirs, as best he knew, there was only one tub, and it wasn’t at his holding. Not without a pang, he’d gone back to being mostly dirty most of the time.

  Fand made eyes first at Van, then at him. “Och, a woman gets lonely, that she does.”

  “If you’re lonely with the two of us to keep you warm at night, would you try a bandit troop next?” Van said.

  She cursed him in the Trokmê language, Elabonian not being satisfying enough for her. Van swore back in the same tongue; he’d traversed the gloomy forests of the Trokmoi before he swam the Niffet (towing his precious armor behind him on a makeshift raft) and splashed up inside Gerin’s holding.

  “Will you be letting him speak to me so?” Fand demanded of the Fox once more.

  “Probably,” he answered. She picked up her drinking jack and threw it at him. She had more fury than finesse. It splashed down behind him and sprayed ale onto a couple of the hounds quarreling over bones. They separated with a yelp. Fand sprang to her feet and stomped upstairs.

  “Not often dull around here,” Van observed to no one in particular.

  “It’s not, is it?” Gerin said. “Sometimes I think I’d find a bit of dullness restful.” He hadn’t known much, not since he came back over the Kirs to take over his father�
�s holdings and especially not since the Trokmoi and their wizard Balamung invaded the northlands. Balamung was dead now, without even a grave to hold him, but too many Trokmoi still raided and settled on this side of the Niffet, adding one more volatile element to already touchy politics.

  Gerin emptied his own jack in a fashion more conventional than Fand’s, went over to the amphora, and poured it full again. Some of his vassals were already swilling themselves into insensibility. If I want dull, he thought, all I need do is listen to the talk around this table. Dice, horses and chariots, crops, women … no new ideas anywhere, just old saws trotted out as if they were fresh-minted from pure gold. He longed for the days when he’d sat in students’ taverns, arguing sorcerous techniques and the shape of the historical process.

  Rihwin the Fox knew the pleasures of intellectual conversation, but Rihwin also knew the pleasures of the wine jar or, that failing, the ale pot. He might complain about having to pour down ale, but that didn’t stop him from doing quite a lot of it. And, at the moment, he had a serving girl on his lap. He would have done a better job of fumbling at her clothes had his hands been steadier.

  Van knew his letters; he’d made a point of learning them when he discovered Elabonian could be written. He even spoke well of its alphabet; Gerin gathered he’d run across other, more cumbersome ways of noting down thoughts in his travels. But learning his letters did not make him interested in quoting poetry, except for informational content, let alone analyzing it.

  As for Gerin’s own vassal barons, most of them thought reading a vaguely effeminate accomplishment (he wondered why; even fewer women than men were literate). They’d learned better than to say so to him, and had learned he was a good fighting man in spite of having a room that stored several dozen scrolls and codices. But that didn’t mean they grew interested in thinking, too.

  Gerin sighed and drank more ale himself. Sometimes he thought slipping back into near barbarism easier than trying to maintain the standards of civilization he’d learned south of the High Kirs. Which is the way civilization falls apart, said the part of him that had studied history.