King of the North Read online

  “Again, you have delivered an accurate summary of the situation,” Rihwin agreed, “provided you mean keeping that allegiance through peaceable means. He may well prove amenable to persuasion by force, however.”

  “Always assuming we win the war, yes.” Gerin’s scowl grew blacker still. “We’ll need to gather together a goodly force before we try it, though. Adiatunnus has made himself the biggest man among the Trokmoi who came over the Niffet in the time of the werenight; a whole great host of them will fight for him.”

  “I fear you have the right of it once more,” Rihwin said. “He has even retained his stature among the woodsrunners while remaining your vassal, no mean application of the political art. As you say, suppressing him, can it be done, will involve summoning up all your other retainers.”

  “Which might give Grand Duke Aragis the excuse he needs to hit my southern frontier,” Gerin said “The Archer will recognize weakness when he sees it. The only reason he and I don’t fight is that he’s never seen it from me—till now.”

  “Will you then let Adiatunnus persist in his insolence?” Rihwin asked. “That would be unlike you.”

  “So it would,” Gerin said, “and if I do, he’ll be attacking me by this time next year. What choice have I, my fellow Fox? If I don’t enforce my suzerainty, how long will I keep it?”

  “Not long,” Rihwin answered.

  “Too right.” Gerin kicked at the dirt once more. “I’ve always known I’d sooner have been a scholar than a baron, let alone a prince.” With old friends, Gerin refused to take his title seriously. “There are times, though, when I think I’d sooner have run an inn like Turgis son of Turpin down in the City of Elabon than be a prince—or practiced any other honest trade, and some of the dishonest ones, too.”

  “Well, why not run off and start yourself an inn, then?” Rihwin poked his tongue into his cheek to show he didn’t intend to be taken seriously. His hands deftly sketched the outlines of a big, square building. “By the gods, I can see it now: the hostelry of Gerin the Fox, all complaints cheerfully ignored! How the dour Elabonians and woad-dyed Trokmoi would throng to it as a haven from their journeys across the northlands to plunder one another!”

  “You, sirrah, are a desperately deranged man,” Gerin said. Rihwin bowed as if he’d just received a great compliment, which was not the effect Gerin had wanted to create. He plunged ahead: “And if I did start an inn, who’d keep the Trokmoi and the Elabonians—to say nothing of the Gradi—from plundering me?”

  “By all means, let us say nothing of the Gradi,” Rihwin said. “I wish my lady love there had never set eyes on that ship of theirs. Father Dyaus willing, none of us will see such ships with our own eyes.”

  But Gerin refused to turn aside from the inn he did not and never would have. “The only way to keep such a place is to have an overlord strong enough to hold bandits at bay and wise enough not to rob you himself. And where is such a fellow to be found?”

  “Aragis the Archer is strong enough,” Rihwin said teasingly. “Were I a bandit in his duchy, I’d sooner leap off a cliff than let him get his hands on me.”

  Gerin nodded. “If he were less able, I’d worry about him less. But one fine day he’ll die, and all his sons and all his barons will squabble over his lands in a war that’ll make the unending mess in Bevon’s holding look like a children’s game by comparison. We’ll not have that here, I think, when I’m gone.”

  “There I think you have reason, lord prince,” Rihwin said, “and so, being the best of rulers, needs must continue in that present post without regard for your obvious and sadly wasted talents as taverner.”

  “Go howl!” Gerin said, throwing his hands in the air “I know too well I’m stuck with the bloody job. It is a hardship, you know: on account of it, I have to listen to loons like you.”

  “Oh! I am cut to the quick!” Rihwin staggered about as if pierced by an arrow, then miraculously recovered. “Actually, I believe I shall go in and drink some ale. That accomplished, I shall take more pleasure in howling.” With a bow to Gerin, he hied himself off toward the great hall.

  “Try not to drink so much you forget your name,” Gerin called after him. The only answer Rihwin gave was a finger-twiddling wave. Gerin sighed. Short of locking up the ale jars, he couldn’t cut Rihwin off. His fellow Fox didn’t turn sullen or vicious when he drank; he remained cheerful, amiable, and quite bright—but he could be bright in the most alarmingly foolish ways. Gerin worried about how often he got drunk, but Gerin, by nature, worried about everything that went on around him.

  Right now, though, worrying about Rihwin went into the queue along with worrying about the Gradi. Both were a long way behind worrying about Adiatunnus. The Trokmê chieftain was liable to have the strength to set up on his own if he chose to repudiate Gerin’s overlordship, arid if he did set up on his own, the first thing he’d do would be to start raiding the lands of Gerin’s vassals … even more than he was already.

  The Fox muttered something unpleasant into his beard. Realizing he never was going to be able to drive all the Trokmoi out of the northlands and back across the Niffet into their gloomy forests came hard. One of the bitter things life taught you was that not all your dreams came true, no matter how you worked to make them real.

  Up in the watchtower atop Castle Fox, the lookout shouted, “A chariot approaches, lord prince!”

  “Just one?” Gerin asked. Like any sensible ruler, he made sure trees and undergrowth were trimmed well away from the keep and from the roads in his holding, the better to make life difficult for bandits and robbers.

  “Aye, lord prince, just the one,” the sentry answered. Gerin had chosen his lookouts from among the longer-sighted men in his holding. As it had a few times before, that proved valuable now. After a few heartbeats, the lookout said, “It’s Widin Simrin’s son, lord prince.”

  The drawbridge had not gone up after Rihwin arrived. Widin’s driver guided his two-horse team into the keep. Widin jumped out of the car before it stopped rolling. He was a strong, good-looking young man in his late twenties, and had held a barony southwest of Fox Keep for more than half his life: his father had died in the chaos after the werenight. Whenever Gerin saw him, he was reminded of Simrin.

  “Good to see you,” Gerin said, and then, because Widin’s keep was a couple of days’ travel away and men seldom traveled without urgent need, he added, “What’s toward?”

  “Lord prince, it’s that thieving, skulking demon of an Adiatunnus, that’s what,” Widin burst out. Worrying about the Trokmoi was already at the head of Gerin’s list, which was the only thing that kept it from vaulting higher. Widin went on, “He’s run off cattle and sheep both, and burned a peasant village for the sport of it, best I can tell.”

  “Has he?” Gerin asked. Widin, who had never studied philosophy, did not know a rhetorical question when he heard one, and so nodded vigorously. Gerin was used to such from his vassals; it no longer depressed him as it once had. He said, “If Adiatunnus is at war with one of my vassals, he’s also at war with me. He will pay for what he’s done to you, and pay more than he ever expected.”

  His voice held such cold fury that even Widin, who’d brought him this word in hope of raising a response, drew back a pace. “Lord prince, you sound like you aim to tumble his keep down around his ears. That would be—”

  “—A big war?” Gerin broke in. Widin nodded again, this time responsively. Gerin went on, “Sooner or later, Adiatunnus and I are going to fight a big war. I’d rather do it now, on my terms, than later, on his. The gods have decreed that we can’t send all the woodsrunners back over the Niffet. Be it so, then. But we can—I hope—keep them under control. If we can’t do even that much, what’s left of civilization in the northlands?”

  “Not much,” Widin said. Now Gerin nodded, but as he did so he reflected that, even with the Trokmoi beaten, not much civilization was left in the northlands.

  II

  Chariots and a few horsemen rolled out of Fox
Keep over the next couple of days, heading east and west and south to summon Germ’s vassals and their retainers to his castle for the war against Adiatunnus. He sent out the men heading west with more than a little apprehension: they would have to pass through Schild Stoutstaff’s holding on the way to the rest of the barons who recognized the Fox as their overlord, and Schild, sometimes, was almost as balky a vassal as Adiatunnus himself.

  Duren went wild with excitement when Gerin decided on war. “Now I can fight beside you, Father!” he said, squeezing the Fox in a tight embrace. “Now, maybe, I can earn myself an ekename.”

  “Duren the Fool, perhaps?” Gerin suggested mildly Duren stared at him. He sighed, feeling like a piece of antiquity unaccountably left adrift in the present-day world. “I don’t suppose there’s any use telling you this isn’t sport we’re talking about. You really maim, you really kill. You can really get maimed, you can really get killed.”

  “You can prove your manhood!” No, Duren wasn’t listening. “Tumbling a serving girl is all very well—better than all very well—but to fight! ‘To battle your enemy with bright-edged bronze’—isn’t that what the poet says?”

  “That’s what Lekapenos says, all right. You quoted him very well.” Gerin looked up to the sky. What was he supposed to do with a boy wild for war? Did justifying being wild for war by quoting from the great Sithonian epic poem mean Duren was properly civilized himself, or did it mean he, as the Trokmoi sometimes did, had acquired a civilized veneer with which to justify his barbaric impulses? Father Dyaus gave no answers.

  Van came out of Castle Fox. Duren ran over to him, saying, “It’ll be war! Isn’t that wonderful!”

  “Oh, aye, it’s wonderful, if you come through in one piece,” Van answered. Duren took the half of the answer was hoping to hear and went into the hall, singing a bloodthirsty song that had nothing to do with Lekapenos: Gerin knew the minstrel who, fool that he was, had translated it from the tongue of the Trokmoi. Van turned round to look after Duren. He chuckled. “The fire burns hot in him, Fox.”

  “I know.” Gerin didn’t try hiding that the fire didn’t burn hot in him. He said, “This is needful, but—” and shrugged.

  “Ahh, what’s the matter? You don’t want to be a hero?” Van teased.

  “I’ve been a hero, over and over again,” Gerin answered. “And what has it brought me, besides always another war? Not bloody much.”

  “You hadn’t decided to be a hero when you went to rescue Selatre from the monsters, you wouldn’t have the wife you’ve got now,” his friend pointed out. “You’d not have three of your children, either. You might still be sharing Fand with me instead, you know.” Van rolled his eyes.

  “Now you’ve given me a defense of heroism indeed!” Gerin said. Both men laughed. Gerin went on, “But I don’t see you rushing toward the fight the way you once did, either.”

  Van looked down at his toes. “I’m not so young as I used to be, either,” he said, as if the admission embarrassed him. “Some days, I’m forced to remember it. My bones creak, my sight is getting long, my wind is shorter than it used to be, I can’t futter three times a night every night any more—” He shook his head. “If you knew how long you were going to be old, you’d enjoy the time when you’re younger more.”

  Gerin snorted “If you’d done any more enjoying while you were younger, either you or the world wouldn’t have lived through it. Maybe you and the world both.”

  “Ah, well, you have something there,” Van answered. “But it’s like you said, Captain: I’ve been a hero, too, and now what am I? I’m the fellow who, if some Trokmê brings me down and takes my head to nail over his doorposts, I turn him into a hero. So they come after me, whatever fight I happen to be in, and after a while it starts to wear thin.”

  “There you have it,” Gerin agreed. “After a while, it starts to wear thin. And the ones who do come after you, they’re always the young, hot, eager ones. And when you’re not so young any more, and not so eager any more, and it has to be done anyhow, then it turns into work, as if we were serfs going out to weed the fields, except we pull up lives instead of nettles.”

  “But nettles don’t uproot themselves and try pulling you up if you leave ’em in the fields,” Van observed. He looked thoughtful. “Can’t you magic Adiatunnus to death, if you don’t fancy fighting him?”

  “Not you too!” The Fox gave his friend a massively dubious look. Hearing vassals and peasants plead cases before him for years had given him a first-rate look of that description. Hardened warrior though Van was, he gave back a pace before it. Gerin said, “I could try spelling Adiatunnus, I suppose. I would try it, if I didn’t think I was likelier to send myself to the five hells than the cursed Trokmê. Putting a half-trained wizard to work is like turning a half-trained cook loose in the kitchen: you don’t know what he’ll do, but you have a pretty good idea it’ll turn out bad.”

  “Honh!” Van shook his head again. “All this time as a prince, and you still don’t think you’re as good as you really are. All the magics you’ve tried that I know of, they’ve worked fine.”

  “That’s only because you don’t know everything there is to know,” Gerin retorted. “Ask Rihwin about his ear one day. It’s not a story he’s proud of, but he may tell it to you. And if you try working a spell with death in it, you’ll get a death, all right, one way or another.”

  “What’s the good of having all those what-do-you-call-’ems—grimoires—in your book-hoard if you won’t use ’em?”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t use them,” Gerin snapped “I do use them—for small things, safe things, where even if I go wrong the disaster will be small, too … and for things so great that having the magic fail won’t be a bigger catastrophe (than not trying it. Putting paid to Adiatunnus is neither the one nor the other.”

  “Honh!” Van repeated. “I may be turning into an old man, but you’re turning into an old woman.”

  “You’ll pay for that, by Dyaus!” Gerin sprang at the bigger man, got a foot behind his ankle, shoved, and knocked Van to the ground. With an angry roar, the outlander hooked an arm around the Fox’s leg and dragged him down, too, but Gerin managed to land on top.

  Men came running from all parts of the keep to watch them wrestle. As Gerin tried to keep Van from tearing his shoulder out of its socket, he reflected that they’d been grappling with each other for too many years. When they’d first begun, his tricks had let him beat Van as often as he lost. Now Van knew all the tricks, and he was still bigger and stronger than the Fox.

  “I’m the prince, curse it,” Gerin panted. “Doesn’t that entitle me to win?” Van laughed at him. Any ruler in the northlands who tried to make more of his rank than was due him got laughed at, even Aragis.

  Strength wouldn’t serve, the usual tricks wouldn’t serve, which left—what? Van tried to throw Gerin away. To the outlander’s surprise, Gerin let him. The Fox flew through the air and landed with a thud and a groan, as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Blood up, Van leaped onto him to finish the job of pinning him to the dirt.

  Gerin stuck an elbow right into the pit of the outlander’s stomach. Van folded up. It wasn’t anything he wanted to do, but he couldn’t help himself; he had to fight to breathe, and, for the first moments of that fight, you always seemed to yourself to be losing. Gerin had no trouble’ pinning him instead of the other way round.

  Van finally managed to suck in a couple of hissing gasps. “Fox, you—cheat,” he wheezed, his face a dusky red because he was so short of air.

  “I know,” Gerin said cheerfully. When his friend could breathe again, he helped pull him to his feet. “Most of the time, they pay off on what you do, not how you do it.”

  “And I thought I had all your tricks down.” Van sounded chagrined, not angry. “It got to the point where you hadn’t come up with anything new in so long, I didn’t think you could. Shows what I know.”

  “Shows I got tired of having that great tun you call a body squashi
ng me flat every time we wrestled,” Gerin answered. “Actually, I used that ploy of seeming helpless against Aengus the Trokmê—remember him? The chief of the clan Balamung the wizard came from? I let the air out of him with my sword, not my elbow.”

  “Felt like your sword,” Van grumbled, lifting up his tunic as if to see whether he was punctured. He had a red mark where Gerin’s elbow had got home; it would probably turn into a bruise. But, considering the scars that furrowed his skin, reminders of a lifetime of wandering and strife, the mark was hardly worth noting. He rubbed at himself and let the tunic fall. “I should have been wearing my corselet. Then you’d have banged your elbow and not my poor middle.”

  “And you talk about me cheating!” Gerin said, full of mock dudgeon.

  “So I do,” Van said. “D’you care to wrestle again, to see if you can befool me twice?”

  “Are you daft?” Gerin answered. “These days, it’s a gift from the gods when I can fool you once. I’m going in for a jack of ale to celebrate.” Van trailed after him, undoubtedly having in mind a jack of ale with which to drown his own discomfiture.

  Before Gerin got to the entrance of the great hall, someone small came dashing out and kicked him in the shin. “Don’t you hurt my papa!” Kor shouted. When Gerin bent down and tried to move him aside, he snapped at the Fox’s hand.

  “Easy there, boy.” Van picked up his son. “He didn’t do me any great harm, and it was a fair fight.” No talk of illicit elbows now. Van carefully gentled Kor down: his son took after Fand in temperament, and Gerin supposed the patience Van needed to live with her—when he did live with her—came in handy for trying to keep the boy somewhere near calm, too.