nights. After a while, Drago the Bear turned to Van and said, 'What about a tale for us, to make the time pass by?' To several of Aragis' men sitting close to him, he added, ' You've never heard a yarnspinner to match him, I promise you.'
'Aye, give us a tale, then,' one of those troopers said eagerly, and in a moment many more-and many of Gerin's men as well-took up the cry.
Van got to his feet with a show of shyness Gerin knew to be assumed. The outlander said, 'I hate to tell a tale now, friends, for after Drago's spoken of me so, how can I help but disappoint?'
'You never have yet,' one of Gerin's men called. 'Give us a tale of far places-you must've seen more of 'em than any man alive.'
'A tale of far places?' Van said. 'All right, I'll give you another story of Mabalal, the hot country where they teach the monkeys to gather pepper for 'em-some of you will remember my tale about that. But this is a different yarn; you might call it the tale of the mountain snake, even though it's really about the snake's head, as you'll see.
'Now, they have all manner of snakes in Mabalal. The plains snake, if you'll believe it, is so big that he even hunts elephants now and again; the only time the natives go after him is when he's fighting one of those huge beasts.'
'What's an elephant?' somebody asked. Gerin knew about elephants, but had his doubts about serpents big enough to hunt them-although he' d never managed to catch his friend in a lie about his travels. After Van explained, the warrior who'd asked the question was loudly dubious about the elephant's snaky trunk, though Gerin knew that was a genuine part of its anatomy.
'Well, never mind,' the outlander said. 'This story's not about elephants or plains snakes, anyhow. Like I said, it's about mountain snakes. Mountain snakes, now, aren't as big as their cousins of the plain, but they're impressive beasts, too. They have a fringe of golden scales under their chins that looks like a beard, and a crest of pointed red scales down the back of their necks almost like a horse's mane. When they're burrowing in the mountains, the sound their scales make reminds you of bronze blades clashing against each other.'
'Are they venomous?' Gerin asked; unlike most if not all of his companions, he was in part interested in Van's stories for their natural-or perhaps unnatural-history.
'I should say they are!' Van answered. 'But that's not why the men of Mabalal hunt them-in fact, it'd be a good reason to leave 'em alone. The snakes sometimes grow these multicolored stones in their heads, the way oysters grow pearls, but these stones are supposed to make you invisible. That's what they say in Mabalal, anyhow.
'There was this wizard there, a chap named Marabananda, who wanted a snakestone and needed an axeman to help him get it. He hired me, mostly on account of I'm bigger'n any three Mabalali you could find.
'Marabananda wove gold letters into a scarlet cloth and cast a spell of sleep over them. Then he carried the cloth out to one of the mountain snakes' nests. The snake heard him coming-or smelled him, or did whatever snakes do-and stuck its head out to see what was going on. He held the cloth in front of it, and as soon as the mountain snake looked, it was caught-snakes can't blink, you know, so it couldn't get free of the spell even for a moment.
'Down came my axe! Off flew the head! The snake's body, back in its burrow, jerked and twisted so much that the ground shook, just like the earthquake that knocked down the temple at Ikos. And Marabananda, he got out his knives and cut into the head-and damn me to the five hells if he didn't pull out one of those shiny, glowing snakestones I was telling you about.
' 'I'm rich!' he yells, capering around like a madman. 'I'm rich! I can walk into the king's treasure house and carry away all the gold and silver and jewels I please, and no one will see me. I'm rich!'
' 'Uh, lord wizard, sir,' says I, 'you're holding the stone now, and I can still see you.'
'Well, Marabananda says this is on account of I'm just a dirty foreigner, and too unenlightened for wizardry to touch. But the Mabalali, he says, they're more spiritually sensitive, and so the magic will work on them. He wouldn't listen to me when I tried to tell him different. But I did talk him into not trying till dead of night, in case he was wrong.
'Around midnight, off he went. He would have had me come with him, but I'd already shown the magic didn't work on me. He got to the treasure, and-' Van paused for dramatic effect.
'What happened?' half a dozen people demanded in the same breath.
The outlander bellowed laughter. 'Poor damned fool, the first guard who spied him going in where he didn't belong struck off his head, same as I did with the mountain snake. I guess it goes to show the snakestone not only didn't make old Marabananda invisible to the guard, it let the guard see something even the wizard couldn't.'
'What's that?' Gerin got the question in before anyone else could.
'Why, that he was a blockhead, of course,' Van replied. 'When he didn't come back from his little trip after a bit, I figured it had gone sour for him and I got out of there before the royal guardsmen came around with a pile of questions I couldn't answer. I don't know what happened to the mountain snake's head after that. Just like life, stories don't always have neat, tidy endings.'
By the way the warriors clapped their hands and came up to chatter with Van, they liked the story fine, neat, tidy ending or no. Aragis told him, 'If ever you find life dull at Fox Keep, you can stay at my holding for as long as you like, on the strength of your tales alone.' When Van laughed and shook his head, the grand duke persisted, 'Or if you decide you can't stomach staying with your Trokme-tempered ladylove another moment, the same holds good.'
'Ah, Archer, now you really tempt me,' Van said, but he was still laughing.
'I'm for my blankets,' Gerin said. 'Any man with a dram of sense will do likewise. We may be fighting tomorrow, and we will be fighting the day after.'
Off in the distance, a longtooth roared. Some of the horses tethered to stakes and to low-hanging branches snorted nervously; that sound was meant to instill fear. It had made Gerin afraid many times in the past. Now, though, he found it oddly reassuring. It was part of the night he'd known all his life. The monsters' higher, more savage screeches he found far more terrifying.
Morning came all too soon, as it has a way of doing. The sun shining in Gerin's face made him sit up and try to knuckle sleep from his eyes. Where all four moons had been absent at sunset, now they hung like pale lamps in the western sky. Soon they would draw apart again, and Gerin would be able to stop worrying about their phases for a while-although he promised himself he'd check their predicted motions in the book of tables from time to time.
Drivers gulped hasty breakfasts of hard-baked biscuits, smoked meat, and crumbly white cheese, then hurried to harness their horses to their chariots. The warriors who rode with them, generally older men of higher rank, finished their breakfasts while the drivers worked. The food was no better, but time could be a luxury, too.
As soon as the chariots rolled out of Gerin's land into the debatable ground south and west of his holding, the troopers saw more and more monsters. The monsters saw them, too; their hideous howls split the air. The Fox wondered if they were warning their fellows-and Adiatunnus' men.
In the debatable lands between Gerin's holding and the territory Adiatunnus had taken for himself when the Trokmoi swarmed over the Niffet, brush and shrubs and saplings grew close to the road. The barons who'd owned that land before had been less careful of it than the Fox had with his. Now most of them were dead or fled. Gerin claimed much of their holdings, but the woodsrunners made his possession too uncertain for him to send woodsmen onto it.
The first arrows came from the cover of the roadside scrub a little past noon. One hummed past his head, close enough to make him start. He snatched up his shield and moved up in the car so he could hope to protect himself and Raffo both. 'Keep going,' he told the driver, and waved the rest of the chariots on as well.
'What?' Van said indignantly. 'Aren't you going to stop and hunt down those cowardly sneaks who shoot without showing their faces?'
'No,' Gerin answered, his voice flat. The unadorned word made Van gape and splutter, as he'd thought it would. When the outlander fell silent, the Fox explained, 'I am not going to slow down in any way, shape, form, color, or size, not for monsters, not for Trokmoi. That's what Adiatunnus wants me to do, so he'll have more time
