'Here,' Gerin said, tasting the uselessness of words. 'Here.' He put an arm around the serf's shoulder. Mannor's tears soaked hot through his tunic. He held the man, and held his own face even harder, to keep from breaking down and blubbering along with him. Hearing what had happened to the serf's son reminded him all too vividly of all the things that might have happened to Duren. That he did not know whichif any-had befallen the boy only let him exercise his ability to envision disasters.
'What do we do with him, lord Gerin?' Notker asked.
The Fox waited until Mannor had cried himself out, then said, ' First thing to do is get him good and drunk.' He pointed the serf toward the entrance to the long hall of the keep. 'Go on in there, Mannor; tell them I said to give you all the ale you can drink.' He shoved Mannor in the direction of the doorway; the man went as if he had no will of his own left. Gerin turned back to Notker. 'We have to see if he can live with this now. He has to see for himself, too. It won't be easy; he'll carry scars no less than if he'd been wounded in war, poor fellow.'
'You know about that, lord prince,' Notker said. The Fox nodded. These days, he had no family left: his father and brother slain, his wife run off, and his son stolen.
As he'd grown used to doing, he resolutely shoved that grief and worry to the back of his mind. More immediately urgent worries took precedence. He said to Notker, 'The Trokmoi and monsters didn't assail your keep?'
'No, lord,' Notker answered. 'First I heard of them coming over the border from Capuel's-Dyaus knows why we still call it that, with nobody in charge there these past years-was when Mannor brought word. The gods only know what's happened since, mind you, but you'd reckon raiders and yon creatures could move faster than a grief-crazy serf if they had a mind to.'
'That you would.' Gerin rubbed his chin in perplexity.
Notker shared that perplexity. 'Not like what you'd look for from the woodsrunners, neither. The Trokmoi, when they hit you, they mostly hit you like a man going into a woman: they want to get in as deep as they can as fast as they can.'
'True enough.' Gerin made an abstracted clucking noise, then suddenly held up one finger. 'I have it, I think. Adiatunnus is a sneaky beggar, and smart, too-though not half so smart as he thinks he is. He's cobbled up some kind of deal with these creatures, but he doesn't know how well it's going to work. So he thinks he'll try it out small at first, and if it does what he hopes, why then he'll strike harder the next time. How does that sound to you?'
'Don't know if it's true,' Notker said after some thought of his own. 'Makes decent sense, though.'
'In a way, it does,' the Fox said. 'But only in a way-that's why I called Adiatunnus half-smart. Now I'm warned. He'll be gathering his forces, collecting more monsters, doing whatever he thinks he needs to do. And do you know what I aim to do in the meanwhile?'
'What's that, lord?' Notker asked.
'I aim to hit him first.'
The chariot hit a bump. Gerin's legs kept him smoothly upright without conscious thought on his part. 'How am I supposed to administer my holding if I'm too busy fighting to pay heed to anything else?' he asked.
Van had adjusted as automatically as the Fox. He glanced over and answered, 'I don't know the answer to that one, but let me give you one in return: how are you supposed to administer your holding if the Trokmoi and the monsters swarm out and take it away from you?'
'There you have me,' Gerin said. 'If I can't keep it, it isn't truly mine. But if I can't run it, it's hardly worth keeping.' Schooling south of the High Kirs had left him fond of forming such paradoxes.
Van cut through this one with the ruthless economy he usually displayed: 'If you still hold on to it, you can always fix it later. If it's lost, it's gone for good.'
'You're right, of course,' Gerin said, but the admission left him dissatisfied. Endless warfare would hurl his holding back into barbarism faster than anything else he could think of. But, as Van had said, everything else turned irrelevant if he didn't win each war.
Along with his regathered host of vassals, he rolled southwest down the same road he'd taken to Adiatunnus' border after Duren disappeared. This time, he wouldn't stop and exchange polite chitchat with the Trokme chieftain's border guards. He'd go after Adiatunnusand his monstrous allies-with all the might he had.
Notker the Bald brought his chariot up alongside Gerin's. He pointed ahead. 'There's my keep, off to one side. At our pace, we'll make the village before sunset.'
'So we will, and then roll through it,' Gerin said. As soon as the sun had started to swing down toward the horizon from its high point in the sky, he'd ordered a couple of chariots out two furlongs ahead of the rest. The Trokmoi were often too impatient to set proper ambushes, and he suspected the monsters Adiatunnus had taken as allies would be even less skilled in the stratagems of war.
A puff of breeze from the west brought a whiff of something sickly sweet. Raffo turned and wrinkled his nose. 'Phew! What's that stink?'
'Dead meat,' Van answered.
The Fox nodded. 'We're coming up on the village Mannor Trout got out of, or what's left of it. Mannor didn't lie, that's certain.'
The closer they got, the worse the smell grew. Gerin coughed. The stink of carrion always made fear and rage bubble up in him: it called to mind the aftermath of too many fights, too many horrors.
The serf village, though, was worse than he'd expected. He'd been braced for sprawled, bloated corpses and charred ruins, and they were there. He'd looked for the livestock to be run off or slain, and it was. He'd known the crows would rise in a black cloud and the foxes slink off into the woods when he disturbed them, and they did.
But he hadn't reckoned on so many of the pathetic corpses looking as they'd been mostly devoured before the scavengers started on them. His stomach did a slow flip-flop. He should have realized the monsters wouldn't be fussy about where they got their meat. Intellectually, he had realized it. The implications, though, had escaped him.
Van said, 'I had thought to round up a hen or two here, to give to the ghosts come sundown and to cook up for us, too. But now I'm going to let that go. The gods alone know what these hens have been pecking at since the Trokmoi and their little friends went home.'
Gerin's stomach lurched again. 'Reasoned like a philosopher,' he said. Anthropophagy, even at one remove, was worth fighting shy of. A few minutes later, a pig stuck its head out of the bushes. No one shot at it. It was even likelier than any surviving village chickens to have fed on the bodies of those who had raised it.
After making sure no life remained in the village, Gerin waved his arm. The chariots rattled on toward the border with the holding of Capuel the Flying Frog. How much of that now lay in the hands of the Trokmoi and the monsters was anyone's guess. Few men said much about what they'd seen in the clearing, but a new, grim sense of purpose informed the force. They'd collect the payment due, and more.
Just before sunset, a cock pheasant made the mistake of coming out from the woods onto a meadow to feed. Its ring-necked head came up in alarm when it saw, or perhaps heard, the chariots on the road. It began to run rapidly, then leaped into the air, its wings thuttering.
Arrows hissed toward it. One of them, either cleverly aimed or luckier than the rest, brought the bird tumbling back to earth. 'Well shot!' Gerin called. 'Not only will it feed the ghosts, it'll feed some of us, too.'
'Aye, a pheasant's tasty, no doubt of that,' Van said. 'Me, though, I'd sooner hang it a while to let it get properly ripe before I cook it.'
'Yes, I've seen you do that at Fox Keep once or twice,' Gerin said. 'I don't care for my meat flyblown, thank you very kindly. Besides, we've no time for such fripperies tonight. Bringing it down at all strikes me as a good enough omen.'
'Flyblown's not the point,' Van replied. 'Bringing out the full flavor is. But you're right about today: we just pluck it and gut it and put it over the flames or bake it in clay.'
'Fuel for the fire,' the Fox agreed. 'It'll help us keep going. And then we'll get into Adiatunnus' lands and set some fires of our own.'
