them.'
'If that's so, lord Gerin, we might as well not have brung these here chariots,' Widin Simrin's son said.
'For fighting, you're right,' the Fox answered, letting his young vassal down easy. 'But we'd have been another two or three days on the road if we'd footed it down here.'
Widin nodded, abashed. Drago the Bear said, 'What'll you have us do with the cars, then? We can't go into the woods with 'em, that's certain, and you say the woods is where we'll find these things.' He shook his head in somber anticipation. 'You're going to make foot soldiers out of us, I know you are.'
'Do you see that I have any choice?' Gerin asked. 'Here's what I'm thinking: we'll split up by chariot crews, with teams of three crews sticking together in teams. That'll give each team nine men, which should be enough to hold off even a pack of the creatures. At the same time, we'll have eight or ten teams spreading out along the border between Bevon's and Ricolf's holdings, and that ought to give us a chance to keep a lot of the beasts from slipping farther north.'
'What about the ones that are already over the border?' Van asked. 'How are you going to deal with them?'
'Bevon's vassals, or rather Bevon's sons' vassals, will slay some of them,' Gerin said. 'That should convince them the things are real and dangerous. As for the others, we'll just have to hope there aren't too many.'
'Fair enough,' Van said, to Gerin's relief. The Fox's great fearone he didn't want to speak aloud to his followers-was that, like the Trokmoi, the monsters would permanently establish themselves in the northlands. If men couldn't rid the woods of wolves, how were they to be free of creatures cleverer and more vicious than wolves?
He divided his men into teams of nine, and appointed a leader for each band. He had contrary misgivings about naming Drago and Rihwin: the one might miss things he ought to find, while the other got in trouble by being too inventive. But they were both better than anyone else in their bands, so he spoke their names firmly and hoped for the best.
He ordered half the teams to head east from the Elabon Way, the other half west. 'We'll go out for three days, hunt for a day, and then come back,' he said. 'Anybody who's not back to the road in seven days' time and hasn't been eaten to give him an excuse will answer to me.'
Eastbound and westbound forces headed out from the highway; the Fox and his chariot crew were in the latter. At first each half of the little army tramped along as a single body, the better to overawe any of the local nobles who might be tempted to fare forth against them. Men chattered and sang and, after a while, began to grumble about sore feet.
When morning had turned to afternoon and the sun sank toward the horizon, Gerin turned to the team headed by Widin Simrin's son. 'You men go back and forth through the woods hereabouts,' he said. 'The rest of us will push on, then leave another team behind, then another, and another, so when we're through we'll have men all along the border. Do you see?'
'Aye, lord,' Widin answered. 'That means at the end of our reach, though, so to speak, we won't be able to search for as long as we will here closer to the Elabon Way.'
'True enough,' the Fox said, 'but I don't know what we can do about it. Travel takes time, and there's no help for it.' He nodded approvingly to Widin; that was a much better point than the one he'd raised before. Gerin hadn't worked the implications of his strategy through so logically himself. 'When we get back to Fox Keep, would you be interested in learning to read and write?'
'No, lord prince,' Widin replied at once. 'Got better things to do with my time, I do-hunting and wenching and keeping my vassals and serfs in line.' He sounded so sure of himself that Gerin subsided with a sigh and did not push the question.
With Widin's team left behind, the rest tramped on. They took a game track through a stand of oaks and emerged on the far side at the edge of cleared fields in which peasants labored. The peasants stared at them in horror, as if they were so many monsters themselves, then fled.
Their cries of terror made Gerin melancholy. 'This holding has seen too much war,' he said. 'Let's push ahead without harming anything here: let them know not every warrior is out to steal what little they have.'
'A wasted lesson if ever I heard one,' Van said. 'The next band through here, so long as it isn't one of ours, will treat them the way they expect us to.' Gerin glared at him so fiercely that he hastened to add, 'But we'll do it your way, Captain-why not?'
Evening came before the Fox reckoned the time ripe to detach another piece of his force. Along with the men he had with him, he tossed knucklebones to see who would stand watch through the night. He felt like cheering when he won the right to uninterrupted sleep. No sooner had he cocooned himself in his blanket and wriggled around a little to make sure no pebbles poked his ribs than he knew nothing of the world around him.
A hideous cry recalled him to himself: a wailing shriek part wolf, part longtooth, part madman. He sat up and looked around wildly, wondering for a moment where he was and what he was doing here. His gaze went to the heavens. Tiwaz, nearly full, stood high in the south; ruddy Elleb, a couple of days past fullness, was in the southeast. Crescent Math had set and Nothos not yet risen. That put the hour a little before midnight.
Then all such mundane, practical thoughts vanished from his head, for the dreadful call again rang through the woods and across the fields. Some men started up from their bedrolls, grabbing for bow or sword. Others shrank down, as if to smother the cry with the thick wool of their blankets. Gerin could not find it in himself to blame them; the scream made him want to hide, too.
In a very small voice, someone said, 'Is that the cry these monsters make?'
'Don't know what else it could be.' Van sounded amazingly cheerful. 'Noisy buggers, aren't they? 'Course, frogs are noisy, too, and a frog isn't hardly anything but air and legs.'
Gerin admired his friend's sangfroid. He also admired the way the outlander had done his best to make the creatures from the caves seem less dangerous; he knew they were a great deal more than air and legs.
The frightful cry rang out yet again. 'How are we to sleep with that racket?' Widin Simrin's son said.
'You roll up in your blanket and you close your eyes,' Gerin said, not about to let Van outdo him in coolness. 'We have sentries aplenty; you won't be eaten while you snore.'
'And if you are, you can blame the Fox,' Van put in, adding, 'Not that it'll do you much good then.'
Off in the distance, almost on the edge of hearing, another monster shrieked to answer the first. That sent ice walking up Gerin's back, not from terror at the faraway cry but because it said the creatures that made those dreadful sounds were spreading over the northlands. Gerin wondered how many more were calling back and forth farther away than he could hear.
The one nearby kept quiet after that. Exhaustion and edgy nerves fought a battle over the Fox; exhaustion eventually won. The next thing he knew, the sun was prying his eyelids open. He got up and stretched, feeling elderly. His mouth tasted like something scraped off the bottom of a chamber pot. He walked over to a tree, plucked off a twig, frayed one end of it with the edge of his dagger, and used it to scrub some of the vileness from his teeth. Some of his men did the same, others didn't bother.
Rihwin, who'd grown up south of the High Kirs, was so fastidious that even frayed twigs didn't completely satisfy him. As he tossed one aside, he said, 'In the City of Elabon they make bristle brushes for your mouth. Those are better by far than these clumsy makeshifts.'
'If you like, you can teach the art to one of the peasants who makes big brushes for rubbing down horses,' Gerin said. 'We might be able to sell them through the northlands-not many southern amenities to be had here these days.'
'My fellow Fox, I admire the wholeheartedness of your mercenary spirit,' Rihwin said.
'Anyone who sneers at silver has never tried to live without it.' Gerin looked around. 'Where'd Van go?'
'He walked into the woods a while ago,' Widin said. 'He's probably off behind a tree, taking care of his morning business.'
The outlander returned a few minutes later. He said. 'When you're done breaking your fast, friends, I want you to come with me. I went looking for the spot where that thing made a racket last night, and I think I found it.'
Several of the men were still gnawing on hard bread and sausage as they followed Van. He led them down a tiny track to a clearing perhaps a furlong from the camp. The carcass of a doe lay there. Much of the hindquarters portion had been devoured.
A scavenging fox fled from the carcass when the men came out of the woods. Van said to Gerin, 'I hope your
