time getting to 'em to take away the pepper.'
'Probably why it costs so much by the time it gets here,' Gerin said.
'Likely so, Captain. Now the folk of Mabalal are lazy, like I said. If we had to hope for them to climb hillsides and cliffs to gather the pepper fruits, it'd cost more than it does, I tell you true. What they do instead is get the monkeys to work for 'em, or maybe trick 'em into it would be a better way to put it.'
'What's a monkey?' asked a warrior from an isolated keep, a man who never went more than a couple of hours' walk from his holding unless on campaign.
'A monkey is a beast about the size of a half-year babe that looks like a furry, ugly little man with a tail,' Van answered patiently. ' They live in trees, and have thumbs on their feet as well as their hands. They're clever and mischievous, almost like children, and they cause a lot of trouble stealing things and ruining them.
'The other thing about monkeys is, they like to do what people doand the folk of Mabalal, who live with 'em the same way we do with dogs and cats, know it. There are whole bands of these monkeys, mind you, that live in the rough country where the pepper trees grow. So when the Mabalali want to get themselves some pepper, what they do is this: they go down to the foothills below the rough country and pick all the fruit off some of the trees there. Then they dump piles of the fruit in little clearings they've made close by, and they pretend to up and leave.
'Now, all the while the monkeys have been watching them from the high ground. The monkeys go and they pick the fruits from the pepper trees, and then they come down and they drop them in the clearings just the same way they'd seen the men do it. Sometimes they'll steal the fruit the Mabalali have left, sometimes they won't. Either way, the Mabalali get the pepper, and they get it without having to do the hard work themselves. So you see, sometimes being lazy isn't such a bad thing after all.'
The warriors buzzed appreciatively, as they would have at any tale well told. For them it was a pleasant way to pass the time and a story to remember so they could tell it in turn. Gerin also liked it on those terms, but it set him thinking in a different way, too. 'I wonder how many useful things have come from men's being too lazy to keep on doing things the same old hard way,' he mused.
'Give me a for-instance, Captain,' Van said.
That made the Fox scratch his head. At last he said, 'Take the fellow who thought of the wagon. Wouldn't you bet he was sick of hauling things on his back?'
'Ah, I see what you're saying,' Van said. 'Likely so.'
'And the fellow who first brewed ale, what was he sick of?' Rihwin asked. With a grin, he answered his own question: 'Seeing straight, I suppose.'
Gerin and Van both laughed at that, but Drago the Bear drew in a sharp, disapproving breath. 'No man first brewed ale,' he said flatly. ' 'Twas the gift of the god Baivers, and any who don't want his anger had best remember it.'
Rihwin opened his mouth for what Gerin was sure would be a reply taken straight from the philosophers of the City of Elabon. Before that reply could emerge, Gerin forestalled it: 'Rihwin, my fellow Fox, I trust you do recall the difficulties you had with Mavrix god of wine not so long ago?'
'Well, yes, I do,' Rihwin said reluctantly. 'I did not believe, however, that you of all people in the northlands would stifle the full and open discussion of ideas of all sorts. I-'
Gerin took him by the arm. 'Here, walk with me,' he said in a tone that brooked no argument. When the two men were as far from the fire and the blood offering as the wailing of the ghosts would let them go, Gerin continued in a low voice, 'For all your study, one thing you never learned: there's a time and a place for everything. If you want to start arguments about the nature and powers of the gods, don't do it when you're heading out on campaign. I want my men's thoughts focused on two things: working with one another and slaughtering any monsters they happen across. Does that make sense to you?'
'I suppose so,' Rihwin said, though he sounded sulky. 'Yet you would be hard-pressed to deny that in theory-'
Gerin cut him off again, this time with a sharp chopping gesture of his left hand. 'Theory is wonderful,' he said. 'What we have here is fact-if the men quarrel among themselves, they won't fight well. You do anything more to make them fight worse than they would otherwise and I'll leave you behind at the first keep we come to, or at a peasant village failing that. Do you understand me?'
'Oh, indeed.' Rihwin angrily tossed his head; firelight glinted from the gold hoop in his left ear. 'You're a hard man when you take the field, lord prince Gerin the Fox.' He loaded Gerin's title with scorn.
'War is too important a business to be slack with it,' Gerin answered, shrugging. 'Will you do as I say and not stir up disputes among the gods, or shall I leave you? Those are your choices, sirrah.'
Rihwin sighed. 'Let it be as you say. You'd do better, though, if you learned to ease men into doing your will rather than hammering them into it.'
'No doubt.' Gerin sighed, too. Rihwin had nothing wrong with his wits, only a dearth of common sense. 'And you'd do better if you thought more before you started talking or doing things. We all try to be the best men we can, and we all fail in different ways. Which watch do you have tonight?'
'The middle one.' Rihwin's mobile features assumed an expression of distaste.
'There, you see?' Gerin said. 'If your head held as much sense as a cabbage, you'd be asleep already instead of standing here arguing with me. Go curl up in your blanket.'
'The power of your reasoning ravishes me yet again,' Rihwin cried. Gerin snorted and made as if to kick him in the backside. The transplanted southerner lay down and soon fell asleep. Gerin had the midwatch, too, but stayed awake a good deal longer.
When the Fox's chariots rolled down into Bevon's holding, all the local barons shut themselves up right in their keeps and prepared to stand siege. 'You just want to bite out another piece of our land,' one of them called from his palisade when Gerin came up to the wall.
'That's not so,' Gerin answered, wondering if the white rag he bore would protect him from the lordlet's archers. As he had so many times before, he spoke of the monsters that had erupted from the caves beneath Biton's temple.
And, as had happened too many times before, he met only disbelief. The petty baron laughed scornfully. 'You're supposed to be clever, Fox. I'd have thought you could come up with a better excuse than that to come down on your neighbors.'
'Have it as you will.' The Fox knew he sounded weary, but couldn't help it. 'You'll find out soon enough whether I'm telling the truth. When you learn I am, maybe you'll remember some of what I've said.' He turned and walked back to the chariot where Van and Raffo waited. No one shot at him, so he just rode on.
Down at the southern border of Bevon's holding, Ricolf's men were no longer wary of the force Gerin used to hold the Elabon Way open. They'd seen the monsters for themselves-seen more of them than the Fox had, as a matter of fact. He spent the first couple of hours after he arrived asking questions.
'Some of the creatures are smarter than others, lord prince, seems like,' one of Ricolf's troopers said. 'I've seen a couple carrying sword or axe, and one even with a helm on its ugly head. But others'll either charge or run off, just like wild beasts.'
'Interesting.' Gerin plucked at his beard. 'How many of them are there, would you say, and how much damage have they done?'
'How many? Too many, that's sure,' the trooper said. 'As for damage, think how much fun wolves would be if they had more in the way of wits, and hands to let them get into things doors and gates keep them out of.'
Gerin thought about it. He didn't like the pictures that painted themselves in his mind. Elabonians were in the habit of calling Trokmoi wolves because of their fierce raids, but they had humanly understandable motives: they were out for loot and captives as well as slaughter for its own sake. Beasts that hunted and killed without grasping, let alone using, the concepts of mercy and restraint were daunting in an altogether different way.
The Fox thanked Ricolf's man and went back to pass the word to his own warriors. 'One thing's certain,' he said when he'd given them the grim news: 'These creatures won't act like a regular army of men. They aren't an army at all, not really. Instead of trying to storm up the Elabon Way in a mass, I look for them to spread through the woods by ones and twos and maybe packs-no larger groups or bands or whatever you want to call
