Prince of the North Read online

  “My thought was the same,” Gerin answered. “I wanted to see if you saw anything on the other side to change my mind.” Van shook his head again and went back to his thrusts and parries.

  Gerin put the same question to Drago. The Bear’s response was simpler: “No way in any of the five hells I want to fight on the same side with the Trokmoi. I’ve spent too much time tryin’ to kill them buggers.” That made Gerin pluck thoughtfully at his beard. Even had he been inclined to strike the bargain with Adiatunnus, his vassals might not have let him.

  He went looking for Rihwin to get one more view. Before he found him, the lookout called, “Another man approaches in a wagon.”

  “Great Dyaus, three sets of visitors in a day,” Gerin exclaimed. Sometimes no one from outside his holding came to Fox Keep for ten days, or twenty. Trade—indeed, traffic of any sort—had fallen off since the northlands went their own way. not only did epidemic petty warfare keep traffic off the roads, but baronies more and more either made do with what they could produce themselves or did without.

  “Who comes?” called a warrior up on the palisade.

  “I am a minstrel, Tassilo by name,” came the reply—in, sure enough, a melodious tenor. “I would sing for my supper, a bed for the night, and whatever other generosity your gracious lord might see fit to provide.”

  Tassilo? Gerin stood stock-still, his hands balling into fists. The minstrel had sung down at the keep of Elise’s father, Ricolf the Red, the night before she went off with Gerin rather than letting herself be wed to Wolfar of the Axe. Just hearing Tassilo’s name, and his voice, brought those memories, sweet and bitter at the same time, welling up in the Fox. He was anything but anxious to listen to Tassilo again.

  But all the men who heard the minstrel name himself cried out with glee: “Songs tonight, by Dyaus!” “Maybe he’ll have ones we’ve not heard.” “A lute to listen to—that’ll be sweet.”

  Hearing that, Gerin knew he could not send the man away. For his retainers, entertainment they didn’t have to make themselves was rare and precious. If that entertainment made him wince, well, he’d endured worse. Sighing, he said, “The minstrel is welcome. Let him come in.”

  When Tassilo got down from his light wagon, he bowed low to the Fox. “Lord prince, we’ve met before, I think. At Ricolf’s holding, was it not? The circumstances, as I recall, were irregular.” The minstrel stuck his tongue in the side of his cheek.

  “Irregular, you say? Aye, there’s a good word for it. That’s the business of a minstrel, though, isn’t it?—coming up with words, I mean.” Being moderately skilled in that line himself, Gerin respected those who had more skill at it than he. He eyed Tassilo. “Curious you’ve not visited Fox Keep since.”

  “I fled south when the Trokmoi swarmed over the Niffet, lord prince, and I’ve spent most of my time since then down by the High Kirs,” Tassilo answered. He had an open, friendly expression and looked as much like a fighting man as a singer, with broad shoulders and a slim waist. In the northlands, any traveling man had to be a warrior as well, if he wanted to live to travel far.

  “What brought you north again, then?” Gerin asked.

  “A baron’s daughter claimed I got her with child. I don’t think I did, but he believed her. I thought a new clime might prove healthier after that.”

  Gerin shrugged. He had no daughter to worry about. He said, “The men look forward to your performance tonight.” Lying a little, he added, “Having heard you those years ago, so do I.” The minstrel could sing and play, no doubt about that. The Fox’s memories were not Tassilo’s fault.

  After a few more pleasantries, Gerin strode out over the drawbridge and headed for the peasant village a few hundred yards away. Chickens and pigs and skinny dogs foraged among round huts of wattle and daub whose thatched conical roofs projected out far enough to hold the rain away from the walls. Children too young to work in the fields stared at Gerin as he tramped up the muddy lane that ran through the middle of the village.

  He stuck his head into Besant Big-Belly’s hut, which was little different from any of the others. The headman wasn’t there, but his wife, a scrawny woman named Marsilia, sat on a wooden stool spinning wool into thread. She said, “Lord, if you’re after my man, he’s out weeding the garden.”

  The garden was on the outskirts of the village. Sure enough, Besant was there, plucking weeds from a patch of vetch. Not only did he have a big belly, he had a big backside, too, which at the moment stuck up in the air. Resisting the urge to kick it, Gerin barked, “Why have you been blowing the horn with the sun only halfway down the sky?”

  Besant jerked as if Gerin had kicked him after all. He whirled around, scrambling awkwardly to his feet. “L-lord Gerin,” he stuttered. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

  “If you don’t want more unexpected visits, make sure you work the full day,” Gerin answered. “We’ll all be hungrier come winter for your slacking now.”

  Besant gave Gerin a resentful stare. He was a tubby, sloppy-looking man of about fifty in homespun colorless save for dirt and stains here and there. “I shall do as you say, lord prince,” he mumbled. “The ghosts have been bad of late, though.”

  “Feed them more generously, then, or throw more wood on the nightfires,” Gerin said. “You’ve no need to hide in your houses from an hour before sunset to an hour past dawn.”

  Besant nodded but still looked unhappy. The trouble was, he and Gerin needed each other. Without the serfs, Gerin and his vassal barons would starve. That much Besant Big-Belly knew. But without the barons, the little villages of farmers would be at the mercy of Trokmoi and bandits: peasants with pitchforks and scythes could not stand against chariots and bronze armor and spears and swords. The headman did his best to ignore that half of the bargain.

  Gerin said, “Remember, I’ll be listening to hear when you blow the horn come evening.” He waited for Besant to nod again, then walked off to see how the village fared.

  The gods willing, he thought, the harvest would be good. Wheat for bread, oats for horses and oatmeal, barley for ale, rye for variety, beans, peas, squashes: all grew well under the warm sun. So did row on row of turnips and parsnips, cabbage and kale, lettuce and spinach. Gardens held vetch, onions, melde, radishes, garlic, and medicinal herbs like henbane.

  Some fields stood vacant, the grass there lengthening for haymaking. Cattle and sheep grazed all the way out to the edge of the trees in others. A couple of lambs butted heads. “They might as well be barons,” Gerin murmured to himself.

  The peasants were hard at it as usual: weeding like Besant, repairing wooden fences to keep the animals where they belonged, unbaling straw to repair a leaky roof—all the myriad tasks that kept the village going. Gerin stopped to talk with a few of the serfs. Most seemed content enough. As overlords went, he was a mild one, and they knew it.

  He spent more time in the village than he’d intended; the sun was already sinking toward the treetops when he headed back to Fox Keep. No, Besant won’t blow the horn early tonight, not with me here so long, he thought. We’ll have to see about tomorrow.

  When he returned to the castle, the cooks were full of praise for the way Otes son of Engelers had fixed half a dozen pots. The Fox nodded approvingly. The large sale the jeweler had made to Fand (or rather, to Van) hadn’t kept him from doing the other half of his job. On seeing Otes himself, Gerin invited him to stay for supper and pass the night in the great hall. By the way he grinned and promptly accepted, the neat little man had been expecting that.

  In the great hall, Tassilo was fitting a new string to his lute and plucking at it to put it in proper tune. Duren watched him in pop-eyed fascination. “I want to learn to do that, Papa!” he said.

  “Maybe you will one day,” Gerin said. Stored away somewhere was a lute he’d had as a boy. He’d never been much good with it, but who could say what his son might accomplish?

  After supper, Tassilo showed what he could do. “In honor of my host,” he said, “I shall give
you some of the song of Gerin and the dreadful night when all the moons turned full together.” He struck a plangent chord from the lute and began.

  Gerin, who had lived through that dreadful night five years before, recognized little of it from the minstrel’s description. Much of that had to do with the way Tassilo composed his song. He didn’t create it afresh from nothing; that would have overtaxed even the wits of Lekapenos, the great Sithonian epic poet.

  Instead, like Lekapenos, Tassilo put his song together from stock bits and pieces of older ones. Some of those were just for the sake of sound and meter; the Fox quickly got used to hearing himself called “gallant Gerin” every time his name was mentioned. It saved Tassilo, or any other poet, the trouble of having to come up with a new epithet every time he was mentioned in the story.

  And some of the pieces of old songs were ones Gerin had heard before, and which didn’t perfectly fit the tale Tassilo was telling now. The bits about battling the Trokmoi went back to his boyhood, and likely to his grandfather’s boyhood as well. But that too was part of the convention. More depended on the way the minstrel fit the pieces together than on what those pieces were.

  All the same, Gerin leaned over to Van and said, “One thing I remember that Tassilo isn’t saying anything about is how bloody frightened I was.”

  “Ah, but you’re not a person to him, not really,” Van replied. “You’re gallant Gerin the hero, and how could gallant Gerin be afraid, even with every werebeast in the world trying to tear his throat out?”

  “At the time, it was easy,” Gerin said, which won a laugh from Van. He’d been through the werenight with Gerin. “Bold Van,” Tassilo called him, which was true enough, but he hadn’t been immune to fear, either.

  And yet, the rest of Tassilo’s audience ate up the song. Drago the Bear, who’d gone through his own terrors that night, pounded on the table and cheered to hear how Gerin had surmounted his: it might not have been true, but it sounded good. Duren hung on Tassilo’s every word, long after the time he should have been asleep in bed.

  Even the Trokmoi, whose fellows had been on the point of putting an end to Gerin when the chaos of the werenight saved him, listened avidly to the tale of their people’s discomfiture. Well-turned phrases and songs of battle were enough to gladden them, even if they came out on the losing side.

  Tassilo paused to drink ale. Diviciacus said to Gerin, “Give me your answer now, Fox, dear. I’ve not the patience to wait for morning.”

  Gerin sighed. “It must be no.”

  “I thought as much,” the Trokmê said. “Yes is simple, but no needs disguises. You’ll be after regretting it.”

  “So will your chief, if he quarrels with me,” the Fox answered. “Tell him as much.” Diviciacus glared but nodded.

  When Gerin, who was yawning himself, tried to pick up Duren and carry him off to bed, his son yelled and cried enough to make the Fox give it up as a bad job. If Duren wanted to fall asleep in the great hall listening to songs, he’d let him get away with it this once. Gerin yawned again. He was tired, whether Duren was or not. With a wave to Tassilo, he headed for his bedchamber.

  What with Fand and Van in the next room, the noise up there proved almost as loud as what the minstrel made, and even more distracting. Gerin tossed and turned and grumbled and, just when he finally was on the point of dropping off, got bitten on the cheek by a mosquito. He mashed the bug, but that woke him up again. He lay there muttering to himself until at last he did fall asleep.

  Because of that, the sun was a quarter of the way up the sky when he came back down to the great hall. Van, who was just finishing a bowl of porridge, laughed at him: “See the slugabed!”

  “I’d have gotten to sleep sooner if someone I know hadn’t been making such a racket next door,” Gerin said pointedly.

  Van laughed louder. “Make any excuse you like. You outslept your guests, no matter what. All three lots of them are long gone.”

  “They want to get in as much travel as they can while the sun’s in the sky. I’d do the same in their boots.” Gerin looked around. “Where’s Duren?”

  “I thought he was with you, Captain,” Van said. “Didn’t you take him up to bed the way you usually do?”

  “No, he wanted to listen to Tassilo some more.” Gerin dipped up a bowl of porridge from the pot over the fire, raised it to his mouth. After he swallowed, he said, “He’s probably out in the courtyard, making mischief.”

  In the courtyard he found Drago the Bear pouring a bucket of well water over the head of Rihwin the Fox. Both of them looked as if they’d seen the bottoms of their drinking jacks too many times the night before.

  “No, I’ve not seen the boy all morning,” Drago said when Gerin asked him.

  “Nor I,” the dripping Rihwin said. He added, “If he made as much noise as small boys are in the habit of doing, I’d remember seeing him … painfully.” His eyes were tracked with red. Yes, he’d hurt himself last night.

  Gerin frowned. “That’s—odd.” He raised his voice. “Duren!” He put two fingers in his mouth, let out a long, piercing whistle that made Rihwin and Drago flinch.

  His son knew he was supposed to come no matter what when he heard that call. He also wasn’t supposed to go by himself too far from Castle Fox to hear it. Wolves and longtooths and other wild beasts roamed the woods. So, sometimes, did wild men.

  But Duren did not come. Now Gerin began to worry. Maybe, he thought, the boy had gone off to the peasant village. He’d done that alone once or twice, and got his backside heated for it. But often a boy needed a lot of such heatings before he got the idea. Gerin remembered he had, when he was small.

  He walked over to the village, ready to thunder like Dyaus when he found his son. But no one there had seen Duren, either. A cold wind of dread in his belly, Gerin went back to Castle Fox. He sent men out in all directions, beating the bushes and calling Duren’s name. They came back scratched by thorns and stung by wasps, but without the boy.

  Duren was missing.

  II

  Gerin paced between the benches in the great hall, making Rihwin and Van and Drago move out of the way. “One of those three must have snatched him,” he said: “Diviciacus or Tassilo or Otes. I can’t believe Duren would go wandering off where we couldn’t find him, not of his own accord.”

  “If you’re right, Captain, we’ve eaten up a lot of the day looking around here,” Van said.

  “I know,” Gerin answered unhappily. “I’ll go out and send others in chariots as well, even so; if Dyaus and the other gods are kind, one of us will catch up with our—guests.” He spat the last word. Guest-friendship was sacred; those who violated it could expect a long, unhappy time in the afterlife. Unfortunately, though, fear of that didn’t paralyze all rogues.

  “Who’d want to steal a little boy?” Drago the Bear growled. His big hands moved in the air as if closing round a neck.

  Gerin’s more agile wits had already started pursuing that one. “Diviciacus might, to give Adiatunnus a hold on me,” he said. “I don’t think Adiatunnus would have ordered it—who could guess ahead of time if the chance would come up?—but I don’t think he’d turn down a gift like that if it fell into his lap.”

  “Duren might give him a hold for now, but he’d get nothing but grief from you later,” Van said.

  “Aye, but since I turned him down for a joint move on Aragis, he’s liable to think he’d get only grief from me anyhow,” the Fox answered, thinking, He’s liable to be right, too. Aloud, he went on, “Speaking of Aragis, Otes the jeweler came from his lands. And Aragis might not turn down a hold on me, either.”

  “You’re right there, too,” Drago said, making more choking motions.

  “You’re leaving out Tassilo,” Van said.

  “I know.” Gerin kicked aside a dog-gnawed bone. “I can’t think of any reason he’d want to harm me.”

  “I can,” Rihwin the Fox said.

  “Can you indeed?” Gerin said, surprised. “What is it?”
/>   Rihwin coughed; his smoothly handsome face went a couple of shades pinker than usual. “You’ll recall, lord, that when last you made the acquaintance of this Tassilo, I was in the process of, ah, disqualifying myself from marrying the fair Elise. I hadn’t tasted wine in too long, you understand.”

  “Disgracing yourself is more like it,” Van said, blunt as usual. Gloriously drunk, Rihwin had stood on his head on a table at Ricolf the Red’s and kicked his legs in the air … while wearing a southern-style toga and no drawers.

  He coughed again. “Perhaps your word is more accurate, friend Van, though not calculated to make me feel better about the incident or myself. Be that as it may, I resume: Elise having found you no more to her taste, lord Gerin, than her father did me, she might possibly have engaged the services of this minstrel to rape away the boy for her to raise.”

  Gerin bit down on that like a man whose teeth closed on a worm in an apple. Ever since Elise left him, he’d done his best not to think about her; whenever he did, it hurt. He had no idea where in the northlands she was, whether she was still with the horse doctor with whom she’d gone away, or even whether she still lived. But what Rihwin said made enough sense that he had to ask himself those questions now.

  Slowly, he answered, “Aye, you’re right, worse luck; that could be so.” He plucked at his beard as he weighed odds. “I still think the Trokmoi are likeliest to have stolen Duren, so Van and I will go southwest after them. Which way did Tassilo fare?”

  “West, toward the holding of Schild Stoutstaff, or that’s where he told the gate crew he was heading,” Drago answered.

  Gerin grunted. If Tassilo had Duren with him, he might well have lied about his chosen direction. Or he might not have. Schild had been the leading vassal to Wolfar of the Axe. He wasn’t a deadly foe to Gerin, as Wolfar had been, but he was no great friend, either. Though he’d acknowledged the Fox his suzerain after Gerin killed Wolfar, he forgot that whenever convenient. He might shelter Tassilo, or at least grant him safe passage.