Werenight

by Turtledove, Harry

  But Gerin shook his head. “I want to push on as long as I may—every moment may prove precious. Sell me two chickens, if you would, so I can give the ghosts blood when they come.”

  “Aye, lord prince.” Pinabel hurried away. He returned a couple of minutes later with a pair of hens, their legs tied with strips of rawhide. Gerin gave him a quarter of a silverpiece for them: probably more than they were worth, but the smallest bit of money he had in the pouch at his belt. Pinabel Odd-Eyes bowed himself almost double.

  As the chariot bounced away, Raffo observed, “Most lords would have said, ‘Give me two chickens’ there.”

  That hadn’t occurred to Gerin. He said, “Those birds aren’t remotely part of the dues Pinabel’s village owes on its land. I have no right just to take them from him.”

  “Neither does any other Elabonian lord with his serfs, if I understand your ways aright,” Van said. “The thing of it is, most wouldn’t let that stop ’em.”

  “You’re probably right,” Gerin said with a sigh. “But the way I see it, I owe my peasants fair dealing, just as they do with me. If I don’t give it, how can I expect to get it in return?”

  “Often enough you won’t get it in return, no matter what sort of dealing you give,” Van said.

  “You’re right.” The Fox sighed again. “But when I don’t, I’m not soft on that, either.” Gerin was scrupulously fair. Anyone who thought him weak on that account soon regretted it.

  “If I don’t stop now, lord Gerin, we’ll not have time to make ready to meet the ghosts,” Raffo said, pointing to the western skyline. The sun, red as hot copper, had to be just on the point of setting.

  Gerin thought about pushing on for another furlong or two, but regretfully decided Raffo was right. At his nod, the driver reined in. Gerin jumped down and gouged out a trench in the soft dirt by the side of the road. That did the edge of his dagger no good, but it was the only digging tool he had. Van handed him the trussed fowls. He cut off their heads, one after the other—the knife was still sharp enough for that—and let their blood spill into the trench.

  None too soon: he still held the second hen over the hole when the ghosts came. They were, as ever, indistinct; the eye would not, could not, grasp their shape. They buzzed round the blood like carrion flies, soaking up vitality from it. Because he’d given them the gift, they were not fierce and angry and terrifying as they would have been otherwise, but tried to give him good advice in return.

  He could not understand them. He had never been able to, save on the werenight, when his brother’s shade managed to deliver a message of truly oracular obscurity—though he’d been able to use it later to destroy Balamung just when the opposite result looked far more likely.

  Van bent over a firebow, twirling a stick with a rawhide lace to start a blaze for the evening. He shook his head like a man bedeviled by gnats. “I wish they’d quit yowling in my mind,” he grumbled, but then he grunted in satisfaction. “Here we go, Raffo—feed me tinder, a bit at a time. You know how.”

  “Aye.” Raffo had been crumbling dry leaves. He poked some into the hole where the stick from the firebow spun. Van breathed gently on the sparks he’d started, hoping to fan them rather than blowing them out. “You have it!” Raffo said, and gave him more tinder to feed the new little flames. With the fire well and truly started, he passed Van larger twigs to load on. Soon the thick chunk of branch on which the outlander had used the firebow would also catch.

  “I wish it were that easy all the time,” Van said. “Gut those birds, Fox, and pluck ’em, so we can get ourselves outside them. They’re better fare than what we brought with us.”

  “You’re right there.” The plucking job Gerin gave the hens was quick and decidedly imperfect. He didn’t care; he was hungry. He picked out the birds’ hearts, livers, and gizzards from the offal to roast them over the fire, then threw the rest of the guts into the trench with the blood.

  He, Raffo, and Van drew stems of grass for the night watches. Few bandits dared the ghosts to travel by night, but Gerin was not the sort to take unnecessary chances—the necessary ones were quite bad enough. And the beasts of the forest, being without souls themselves, took no notice of the night spirits. They usually did not attack travelers encamped in the woods, but you never could tell.

  Van drew the short stem, and chose the first watch. Gerin and Raffo drew again. This time Raffo won, and picked the watch that led to dawn. “Since I get to have my sleep broken up, I may as well take what I can get of it,” Gerin said, and wrapped himself in a blanket—as much to keep off the bugs as for warmth, for the night was mild.

  Van shook him awake with the cheerful insouciance of a man who’d already done his share of a job. “Nothing much doing, Captain,” he said while Gerin tried to break free of the fog that shrouded his wits. Van took off the helm, corselet, and greaves he’d worn through his watch, cocooned himself in his blanket, and was snoring by the time the Fox began to think himself awake.

  Gerin put on his own helmet and sword, but did not bother with his cuirass. He paced back and forth, not willing to sit down until he was sure he wouldn’t doze off. The fire had died into embers. He fed it twigs and then branches and brought it back to briskly crackling life. That drove away some of the ghosts flittering near, and reduced their murmur in his mind.

  By the time he’d taken care of that, he felt more confident he could stay awake. He walked to the edge of the circle of firelight and sat down with his back to the flames. His night vision, almost ruined when he’d stoked them, slowly returned.

  The moons had wheeled a good way through the sky. Nothos was nearing the western skyline, Math well west of south—when her golden gibbous disk sank below the horizon, it would be time for the Fox to rouse Raffo. Elleb, looking like a bright new bronze coin, neared the meridian.

  Here and there in the forest, birches mingled with ash and oak and pine. By the light of the moons and the nightfire, their pale trunks seemed almost to gleam against the darker background.

  Gerin wished his ears could grow more sensitive to the dark the way his eyes did. Off in the distance, a barn owl hooted. The Trokmoi thought the souls of dead warriors inhabited the pallid night birds. The Fox had his doubts about that, but he’d never tried a sorcerous experiment to find out one way or the other. He spent a while trying to figure out how such an experiment might be run, and what he could do if he found the Trokmoi were wrong. Making the arrogant woodsrunners doubt themselves in any way was likely to be worthwhile.

  “You know,” he said to himself in a low voice, “the midwatch isn’t so bad after all. I don’t get enough time of my own, with no one havering at me to do this or decide that right this moment.” In small—or sometimes not so small—doses, he relished solitude.

  Perhaps three parts of his four-hour watch had gone by when a coughing roar not far away roused him from contemplation, or rather jerked him out of it by the scruff of the neck. No one could ignore a longtooth’s hunting cry; a man’s blood knew it meant danger. One of the horses let out a frightened snort. The Fox found his left hand on the hilt of his sword without conscious memory of how it had got there—not that a sword would stop one of the great hunting cats if it chose to hunt him.

  The longtooth, to his vast relief, came no closer to the campsite. “Well,” he muttered, “I’m not sleepy now.” He felt as if he’d had ice water splashed over him. When a nightjar swooped down to grab one of the moths fluttering around the fire, he almost jumped out of his skin.

  He woke Raffo as soon as Math set. The driver looked toward the west, saw the moon was down, and nodded in approval. “No one ever said you weren’t one for right dealing, lord,” he said blurrily around a yawn.

  Gerin wrapped himself in his blanket once more. He kept an eye on Raffo to make sure the younger man wouldn’t go back to sleep as he almost had. Raffo, though, took watch-standing seriously, and paced about as the Fox had. Gerin feared he himself would have trouble dozing off again but, in spite of his worries
, quickly drifted away.

  The rising sun made him rise, too. His eyes came open just as the ghosts vanished for the day. He got to his feet, feeling elderly. Van was still snoring. Gerin roused him cautiously; the outlander’s first waking act—especially when he was disturbed—was usually to grab for a weapon.

  This time, though, he seemed to remember where he was, and came to himself without violence. He headed for the forest, saying, “Either I go off behind a bush or I burst where I stand.”

  “I watered the grass on watch, so I don’t have that worry,” Gerin said, buckling on his right greave. Raffo harnessed the horses.

  The chicken bones and guts were already beginning to stink. The travelers moved upwind before they gnawed on bread and smoked meat. “Are we ready?” Raffo asked, looking around the little camp to make sure nothing had been forgotten. Gerin looked, too; if they had left something behind, he would have blamed himself.

  They climbed into the chariot, Raffo driving, Gerin behind him on the left, Van on the right. Raffo flicked the reins. The horses started forward. When they came to a stream, Raffo let the animals have a brief drink. Gerin scooped up some water in the palm of his hand, too, and freshened what he carried in the waterskin at his belt.

  At the next road that ran west, Raffo swung the chariot onto it. A little village lay not far from the crossroads. The appearance of their lord so early in the day was a prodigy for the peasants. When he asked if they’d seen Diviciacus and his comrades the day before, one of the men nodded. “Aye, just before noon it were,” he said. A couple of other people nodded.

  The Fox scowled; he was on the right track, aye, but no closer to the Trokmoi than when he’d set out. If they were traveling hard, maybe they had a reason. “Did they have a boy with them?” he asked, and then amplified that: “My son, I mean.”

  The serfs looked at one another. “Didn’t see no boy, lord,” answered the fellow who’d spoken before.

  That wasn’t what Gerin wanted to hear. Had the Trokmoi cut Duren’s throat as if he were some sacrifice to the night ghosts, then dumped the corpse by the side of the road? Horrid dread filled him: his father, his brother—now his son, too? If that was so, he vowed he’d not rest till every red-mustached robber south of the Niffet was dead or routed back to the northern woods. Even as he made it, he knew the vow to be impossible of fulfillment. He spoke it in his mind, all the same; it would give his life a target.

  “Take everything you can from the horses,” he told Raffo, his voice harsh. “Now we have to catch them before they win back to Adiatunnus’ lands.”

  “Aye, lord Gerin.” But Raffo sounded doubtful. “They have a long lead, though. Gaining enough ground won’t be easy, the more so as we may have to keep casting about for the road they took.”

  “I know that,” Gerin growled. “But I’ll have answers from them if I have to wring out each word with hot pincers.”

  Van thumped him on the shoulder. “Easy, Captain, easy. We don’t even know they ever had the lad, mind you.”

  “But they must have—” Gerin stopped, shook his head. Assuming something was so because you thought it had to be was one of the flaws in logic that made the savants in the City of Elabon laugh. He took a deep breath and said, “You’re right. We don’t know they had him.”

  He wondered if he ever would, or could, know. Had Diviciacus and his crew killed Duren and tossed his body into the woods, scavengers would make short work of it (he knew too well that his son had only a little meat on his bones). When he’d charged out after the Trokmoi, he’d figured he or Drago or Rihwin or Widin would catch up with Duren’s kidnappers, rescue the boy, and return in triumph to Castle Fox. Now he realized he’d been making assumptions there, too. Uncertainty, in a way, felt even worse than being sure of Duren’s death would have. How long could he go on wondering without going mad?

  Then he thought that, after a while, he wouldn’t be uncertain any more. He’d have to reckon Duren dead if he wanted to keep on living himself.

  “Push them,” he said to Raffo. This time, the driver did not answer back. He flicked the whip over the horses’ backs. They leaned into the harness, pushed their pace up to a fast trot.

  The chariot rolled through another peasant village and then drove by the small keep of Notker the Bald, one of Gerin’s vassal barons. “Aye, lord Gerin,” Notker called from the palisade, “they came by here yesterday, sometime past noon, but they showed shield of truce, just as they had on the way to your castle, so I thought no more about it.”

  “Did they have Duren with them?” Gerin asked. Two sets of serfs had already answered no to that, but the Fox put the question again anyhow. Maybe, he thought with what he knew to be irrationality, a noble would have noticed something the serfs had not.

  But Notker shook his head. “Your son, lord?” he said. “No, I saw him not. What then? Is it war between the woodsrunners and us despite the truce sign?”

  “By the gods, I wish I knew.” Gerin tapped Raffo on the shoulder to drive on before Notker asked any more questions he couldn’t answer.

  Toward the middle of the afternoon they passed the boundary stone that had marked the border between Gerin’s holdings and those of his southwestern neighbor, Capuel the Flying Frog. No one had seen Capuel since the werenight; Gerin sometimes wondered if his ekename had been a clue to a were strain in his family and he’d turned toad when all the moons rose full together. More likely, though, the Trokmoi had slain him.

  The boundary stone lay on its side these days, ruining the charms for peace and prosperity that had been carved into it. Whether that was cause or effect Gerin did not know, but Capuel’s former holding knew no peace these days. None of his vassals had been able to take any kind of grip on the land. The Fox held some of it himself, Trokmoi had overrun a couple of keeps, and the rest was given over to banditry.

  The first peasant village the chariot passed was only a ruin, some of the houses burned, the rest falling to pieces from lack of care. Some grain grew untended in weed-choked fields, but before another generation passed no sign would be left that man had ever lived here.

  “Captain, we may need to stop to hunt toward sunset, and I don’t mean for the Trokmoi,” Van said. “Who’s going to sell us a chicken in country like this?”

  Gerin didn’t answer. He knew Van was right but didn’t want to admit it, even to himself. Stopping to slay an animal with whose blood to propitiate the ghosts would make him lose time on Diviciacus, not gain it.

  The next village was still inhabited, but that did the travelers no good. Only a handful of people remained in what had been a fair-sized hamlet. When one of them spotted an approaching chariot, he let out a yell full of fear and desperation. Everyone—men, women, children—fled from fields and houses into the nearby woods.

  “Wait!” Gerin shouted. “I just want to ask you a couple of questions.” No one paid him any attention.

  He looked helplessly to Van. The outlander said, “You ask me, Captain, these poor buggers have got themselves trampled too often lately to take chances when somebody who looks like a warrior comes by.”

  “No doubt you’re right,” the Fox answered, sighing. “Doesn’t say much for the state the northlands are in, does it?”

  “Your serfs don’t run from you, lord Gerin,” Raffo said.

  “That’s so,” Gerin said, “but there’s more to the northlands than my holdings—and if I took in these lands, I’d do it by war, so the peasants here wouldn’t get the chance to learn I treat them decently. They’d just go on running when they saw me coming.”

  Raffo didn’t answer. Unless he should be involved in fighting to gain control of land beyond Gerin’s holding, it was too remote to matter to him. That made him typical, not otherwise, which saddened Gerin: he tried to think in larger terms.

  Van said, “You’re not the only baron—excuse me, Captain: prince—the serfs don’t flee. What Aragis does to the ones who run that he catches makes all the others think three times before they try it
.”

  “He’s a hard man,” Gerin agreed. “Harder than need be, I think. But it may be that hard times require a hard man. Who can tell for certain?”

  “Do you know what your trouble is, Captain?” Van said.

  “No, but I daresay you’re going to tell me,” the Fox answered, raising that eyebrow of his. Every so often, Van found a flaw in him, rarely the same one twice. The infuriating thing was that more often than not he had a point.

  “Your trouble, Captain, is that you’re so busy trying to understand the other fellow’s point of view that you don’t give enough heed to your own.”

  Gerin clutched his chest and lurched in the chariot, as if pierced by an arrow. Van’s chuckle rumbled deep in his chest. That was a hit, though, and the Fox knew it. He said, “Understanding the other fellow has its uses, too. Sometimes he may even be right.”

  “And what does that have to do with the price of tin?” Van said. “All you really need worry about is that he does what you have in mind.”

  “Are you sure you’re not really a Trokmê after all?” Gerin asked mildly. That earned him the glare he’d expected.

  The chariot rattled past a burned-out keep. Perched atop one of the charred logs sat a fat bustard. Van tapped Raffo on the shoulder, pointed. The driver pulled back on the reins; the horses stopped and began to graze. Van reached for Gerin’s bow. “I saw the bird—will you let me do the hunting?” he asked.

  “Go ahead,” the Fox answered. Van might think slaying men with the bow an effete way to fight, but he was a fine archer nonetheless.

  The outlander strung the bow. Gerin handed him an arrow. He dropped down from the chariot and slid toward the bustard, light on his feet as a stalking longtooth. The bustard grubbed under its wing for mites. Van got to within twenty paces before he stood still, nocked the shaft, drew the bow, and let fly.

  The arrow hit the bustard just below where it had been scratching. It let out a startled squawk and tried to fly, but tumbled off its log into the ditch that had not served to protect the palisade. Van scrambled in after it. When he came out again, he carried the bird by the feet and wore an enormous grin.