himself a thinker instead of a brawler.
His son Duren loved him, aye, but now it was his turn to have trouble returning that love, because whenever he saw Duren, he thought of Elise. She'd loved him for a while, until passion cooled… and then just disappeared, with only a note left behind begging him not to go after her. It was, in fact, very much the way she'd fled with him from her father's keep.
He didn't feel like going into any of that with Rihwin. Instead, he answered, 'I don't care whether Besant Big- Belly loves me or not.' That, at least, was true. 'I do care that we grow enough to get through the winter, for if we don't, Besant will be big-bellied no more.'
'He would say, did he dare, that all the peasants would be biggerbellied did they not have to pay you a fourth of what they raised,' Rihwin observed.
'He could say it to my face, and well he knows it,' Gerin returned. 'I'm not a lord who makes serfs into draft animals that happen to walk on two legs, nor do I take the half some barons squeeze from them. But if I took nothing, who would ward them from the chariot-riding wolves who'd swoop down on them?'
He waited for Rihwin to say something like, 'They could do it for themselves.' He was ready to pour scorn on that idea like boiling water splashing down from the top of a palisade onto the heads of attackers. Farmers didn't have the tools they needed to be fighters: the horses, the chariots, the swords, the armor. Nor did they have the time they needed to learn to use those tools; the endless rhythms of fields and livestock devoured their days.
But Rihwin said, 'My fellow Fox, sometimes you don't know when you're being twitted.'
Denied his chance to rend Rihwin with rhetoric, Gerin glared. He walked around to the front of the castle. Rihwin tagged along, chuckling. As they went inside, another horn sounded from a more distant village, and then another almost at the edge of hearing. Gerin said, 'You see? If one village knocks off early, they all do it, for they hear the first horn and blow their own, figuring they don't want to work any harder than the fellows down the trail.'
'Who does like to work?' Rihwin said.
'No one with sense,' Gerin admitted, 'but no one with sense will avoid doing what he must to stay alive. The trouble is, not all men are sensible, even by that standard.'
'If you think I'll argue with that, you're the one who's not sensible,' Rihwin said.
The great hall of the castle occupied most of the ground floor. A fire roared in the stone hearth at the far end, and another, smaller, one in front of the altar to Dyaus close by. Above the hearth, cooks basted chunks of beef as they turned them on spits. Fat-wrapped thighbones, the god's portion, smoked on the altar. Gerin believed in feeding the god well; moreover, after his brush with Mavrix, he figured he could use all the divine protection he could get.
Two rows of benches ran from the doorway to the hearth. In winter, seats closest to the fire were the choice ones. Now, with the weather mild, Gerin sat about halfway down one row. A couple of dogs came trotting through the rushes on the rammed-earth floor and lay at his feet, looking up expectantly.
'Miserable beggars,' he said, and scratched their ears. 'I don't have any food myself yet, so how can I throw you bones and scraps?' The dogs thumped their tails on the ground. They knew they got fed sooner or later when people sat at those benches. If it had to be later, they would wait.
Van and Drago the Bear and the other gamblers came in, chattering about the game. Duren frisked among them. When he saw Gerin, he ran over to him, exclaiming, 'I rolled the dice a lot, Papa! I rolled double six twice, and five-and-six three times, and-'
He would have gone down the whole list, but Van broke in, 'Aye, and the little rascal rolled one-and-two for me, and sent me out of that round without a tunic to call my own.' He shook a heavy fist at Duren in mock anger. Duren, safe beside his father, stuck out his tongue.
'The dice go up, the dice go down,' Drago said, shrugging shoulders almost as wide as Van's. From him, that passed for philosophy. He was a long way from the brightest of Gerin's vassals, but a good many more clever men managed their estates worse. Since Drago never tried anything new, he discovered no newfangled ways to go wrong.
Gerin called to one of the cooks, 'We have enough here to begin. Fetch ale for us, why don't you?'
'Aye, lord prince,' the man answered, and hurried down into the cellar. He returned a moment later, staggering a little under the weight of a heavy jar of ale. The jar had a pointed bottom. The cook stabbed it into the dirt floor so the jar stood upright. He hurried off again, coming back with a pitcher and a double handful of tarred leather drinking jacks. He set one in front of everybody at the table (Duren got a small one), then dipped the pitcher into the amphora, pouring and refilling until every jack was full.
'Take some for yourself, too,' Gerin said; he was not a lord who stinted his servants. Grinning, the cook poured what looked like half a pitcher down his throat. Gerin slopped a little ale out of his mug onto the floor. 'This for Baivers, god of barley,' he intoned as he drank.
'This for Baivers,' the others echoed as they poured their libations. Even Van imitated him: though Baivers was no god of the outlander's, the deity, whose scalp sprouted ears of barley instead of hair, held sway in this land.
Rihwin made a sour face as he set down the mug. 'I miss the sweet blood of the grape,' he said.
'Point the first: the grape doesn't grow in the northlands and we' ve lost our trade south of the High Kirs,' Gerin said. 'Point the second: when you drink too much wine, dreadful things happen. We've seen that again and again. Point the third: wine lies in Mavrix's province, and have you not had your share and more of commerce with Mavrix?'
'True, all true,' Rihwin said sadly. 'I miss the grape regardless.'
The cooks came round with bowls of bean-and-parsnip porridge, with tiny bits of salt pork floating in it to give it flavor. Like everyone else, Gerin lifted his bowl to his lips, wiped his mouth on his sleeve when he was done. South of the High Kirs, they had separate squares of cloth for cleaning your face and fingers, but such refinements did not exist north of the mountains.
Off the spit came the pieces of beef. While one cook carved them into man-sized portions, another went back to the kitchen and came out with round, flat, chewy loaves of bread, which he set in front of each man at the table. They'd soak up the juices from the meat and get eaten in their turn.
Gerin patted the empty place between Van and him. 'Put one here, too, Anseis. Fand is sure to be down before long.'
'Aye, lord prince,' the cook said, and did as he was asked.
Duren started tearing pieces from his round of bread and stuffing them into his mouth. Gerin said, 'If you fill yourself up with that, boy, where will you find room for your meat?'
'I'll put it someplace.' Duren patted his stomach to show the intended destination.
Just as the cook who was carving the beef started loading steaming gobbets onto an earthenware tray, Fand did come down from Castle Fox's living quarters into the great hall. Gerin and Van glanced over at each other, smiled for a moment, and then both waved her to that place between them.
'Och, you're still not after fighting over me,' she said in mock disappointment as she came up. Beneath the mock disappointment, Gerin judged, lay real disappointment. She might have resigned herself to their peacefully sharing her, but she didn't like it.
Hoping to get her off that bloodthirsty turn of thought, Gerin called for a servant to pour her a jack of ale. He handed it to her himself. 'Here you are.'
'I thank you, sure and I do.' Her Elabonian held a strong Trokme lilt. She was a big, fair woman, not too much shorter than the Fox, with pale skin dusted with freckles wherever the sun caught it, grayblue eyes, and wavy, copper-colored hair that tumbled past her shoulders. To Gerin, men of that coloring were enemies on sight; he still sometimes found it odd to be sharing a bed with a woman from north of the Niffet.
Not odd enough to keep me from doing it, though, he thought. Aloud, he said to Fand, 'Should I have put you on a boat across the river after all?'
''Twould have been your own loss if you had,' she retorted, tossing her head so the torchlight glinted in her hair. One thing she had was unshakeable self-confidence-and why not, when two men such as they danced to her tune?
