puking on him, I might manage that, but I'm not good for much more.'
'I feel the same way,' Van said, 'but no matter how sick I am, if it's a choice between fighting and dying, I expect I'll do the best job of fighting I can.'
'Can't argue with that,' Gerin said. 'If you think I'll be looking for a fight today, though, you're daft.'
'Nor I, and I'm a sight fonder of them than you are,' Van said. ' The thing of it is, a fight may be looking for you.'
'Why do you think I'm doing this?' Gerin shrugged his shoulders a couple of times to fit his corselet as comfortably as he could, then jammed his bronze pot of a helm over his head. Sighing, he said, 'Let' s go.'
'Just a moment.' Van adjusted the cheekpieces to his own fancy helm, then nodded. By his pained expression, that hurt, too. Anticipating still more future pain, he said, 'And we'll have to listen to the cursed wagon wheels squeaking all the rest of the day, too.'
Gerin hadn't thought of that. When he did, his stomach churned anew. 'We've got to do something about that,' he declared.
'Stay here a while longer?' Van suggested.
'We've stayed too long already, thanks to you and your carouse. Curse me if I want to spend another useless day here because you drank the ale jar dry-and I helped, I admit it,' the Fox added hastily. He plucked at his beard. Thinking straight and clear through a pounding headache was anything but easy, but after a few seconds he snapped his fingers. 'I have it! I'll beg a pot of goose grease or chicken fat or whatever he has from the innkeeper. It won't be perfect, the gods know, but it should cut the noise to something we have hope of standing.'
Van managed the first smile he'd risked since he woke up. He made as if to slap Gerin on the back, but thought better of it; perhaps he imagined how he would have felt had someone bestowed a similar compliment on him in his present delicate condition. 'By the gods, Captain, it can't hurt,' he exclaimed. 'I was thinking we'd have to suffer the whole day long, and no help for it.'
'No point in suffering if you don't have to,' Gerin said. 'And I can't think of a better way to use wits than to keep from suffering.'
The innkeeper produced a pot of chicken fat without demur, though he said, 'There's a cure for a long night I never ran across before.'
'Aye, that's just what it is, but not the way you mean.' The Fox explained why he wanted the fat. The innkeeper looked bemused, but nodded.
Gerin crawled under the wagon and applied a good coat of grease to both axles. When he came out and stood up again, Van said, 'We'll draw flies.'
'No doubt,' Gerin said. 'After a while, it'll go bad and start to stink, too, and somebody will have to scrub it off. For today, it'll be quieter. Wouldn't you say that's worth it?'
'Oh, aye, you get no quarrel from me there.' Van's laugh was but a faint echo of his usual booming chortle, but it served. 'Thing of it is, I'm usually the one with no thought but for today and you're always fretting about tomorrow or the year after or when your grandson's an old graybeard. Odd to find us flip-flopped so.'
The Fox considered that, then set it aside. 'Too much like philosophy for early in the day, especially after too much ale the night before. Shall we be off?'
'Might as well,' Van said. 'Can I humbly beg you to take the reins for the first part of the go? I don't think you hurt yourself as bad as I did.'
'Fair enough.' Gerin clambered onto the seat at the front of the wagon. The reins slid across the calluses on his palms. Van got up beside him, moving with an old man's caution.
'The lord Biton bless the both of you, good my sirs,' the groom said.
Gerin flicked the reins. The horses leaned forward against their harness. The wagon rolled ahead. It still rattled and creaked and jounced, but didn't squeak nearly as much as it had. Van looked wanly happy. 'That's first rate,' he said. 'With even a bit o' luck, I'll feel like living by noon or so.'
'About what I was hoping for myself,' Gerin said. He drove out of the stable yard and around to the front of the inn. The wagon wasn't as quiet as all that, but it was enough quieter than it had been to satisfy him.
The innkeeper stood by the entryway and bowed himself double as the wagon passed him. 'The lord Biton bless the both of you,' he said, as the groom had. 'May you come again to Ikos before long, and may you recall my humble establishment with favor when you do.'
'They didn't used to act like that before the Empire blocked the last pass through the Kirs,' Gerin murmured. 'Then they had guests up to the ceiling and sleeping in the horses' stables, and they hardly knew or cared whether they saw anyone in particular again.'
'Reminds me of a story, Captain, indeed it does,' Van said, a sure sign he was feeling better. 'Have I told you how they get the monkeys to pick pepper?'
'No, I don't think I've heard that one,' Gerin answered. 'How do they-'
He got no further, for the horses gave a snort of alarm and reared in terror. Trying to fight them under control, Gerin thought their unexpected motion the reason the wagon swayed beneath his fundament as if suddenly transformed to a boat bobbing on a choppy sea. Then Van shouted 'Earthquake!' and he realized the whole world was trembling.
He'd felt earthquakes once or twice before, years ago. The ground had twitched, then subsided almost before fear could seize him. This quake was nothing like those. The shaking went on and on; it seemed to last forever. Through the roar of the ground and the creaking of the buildings in the town of Ikos, he heard cries of fear. After a moment, he realized the loudest of them was his own.
A couple of inns and houses did more than creak; they collapsed into piles of rubble. And when the Fox looked down the street toward the temple of Biton, he saw with horror that the gleaming marble fane was also down, along with great stretches of the wall that protected the holy precinct.
When the earth finally relented and stood still, Gerin realized his hangover was gone; terror had burned it out of him. He stared at Van, who stared back, his usually ruddy face fishbelly white. ' Captain, that was a very bad one,' the outlander said. 'I've felt quakes a time or two here and there, but never any to compare with that.'
'Nor I,' Gerin said. The ground shook again, just enough to send his heart leaping into his mouth. He scrambled down from the wagon and ran toward the nearest fallen building, from which came pain-filled shouts. Van ran right beside him. Together they pulled away timbers and plaster until they could haul out a fellow who, but for a couple of cuts and a mashed finger, had taken miraculously little hurt.
'All the gods bless you,' the man said, coughing. 'My wife's in there somewhere.' Careless of his own injuries, he began clawing at the wreckage himself. Gerin and Van worked with him. Men and women also came running from buildings that had stayed upright.
Then someone screamed, 'Fire!' Flames born in the hearth or on Dyaus' altar or of some flickering lamp were loose and growing. Black smoke, thin at first but all too quickly thicker, boiled up to the sky-and not just from the downfallen inn where the Fox labored. Every wrecked building was soon ablaze. The shrieks of those trapped under beams rose to a new and dreadful pitch.
Along with everyone else, Gerin fought the fires as best he could, but there were not enough buckets, not enough water. Flames grew, spread, began to devour buildings the earthquake had not tumbled.
'Hopeless,' Van said, coughing and choking against the smoke that now streaked his face with soot. 'We don't get away, we're going to cook, too, and the wagon and horses with us.'
Gerin hated to retreat, but knew his friend was right. He looked again toward Biton's overthrown temple. 'By the gods,' he said softly, and then shivered when, as if the gods were listening, the ground shook again. 'I wonder if the Sibyl foresaw this when she prophesied yesterday.'
'There's a thought.' Van's face lit up. 'And here's another: with the wall down and the temple guards likely either squashed or scared to death, what's to keep us from scooping a wagonload of gold out of the holy precinct?'
'You're braver than I am if you want to chance Biton's curse,' Gerin said. 'Remember the corpses we've seen of those who tried stealing from the temenos?' By Van's expression, first sulky and then thoughtful, he hadn't remembered, but did now. Gerin went on, 'But let's head over there anyhow. We ought to see if we can do anything for the poor Sibyl. If I know those greedy priests, they'll be so worried over the temple and their treasures that they're liable to forget her-and she may not even be aware to remind them she's alive.' The thought of her lying in the rubble, trapped and unconscious and perhaps forgotten, raised fresh horror in him: he
