The Hallowed Hunt

and gave a low-voiced order. In a few minutes, one of the older men appeared, laden with a basin, cloths, and a bundle. He evicted Ottovin from the bench and signed Ingrey to give over his wounded hand. As the grubby bandage came off, the man winced at the new rupture and the aging, dark purple bruises. Ottovin, leaning over to watch, gave a short whistle, and said something that made Jokol bark a laugh. Jokol kindly held the drinking bowl to Ingrey’s lips again before the grizzled fellow stabbed and sewed the flesh once more. When the fellow had finished, wrapped the hand, gathered his gear, ducked his head, and gone off again, Ingrey resisted the strong desire to put his head down between his knees for sheer dizziness. It was plain he was not going anywhere just yet.

As promised, the food was both soon and much. It happily included no dried fish, stony journey-bread, or other repellent sea rations, but rather appeared to have been gathered fresh from the town markets. Cooks in the noble houses of Easthome might prepare more delicate feasts, but it was all good, far beyond the camp fare Ingrey had been expecting. Ingrey, giving it the attention it deserved, failed to fend off the fellow intent on refilling his bowl whenever the fluid level dropped below half.

Full night had fallen before the men began actively to resist their cheerful kitchen comrades’ attempts to reload their platters. Ingrey’s plan to let time and the meal sober him enough to rise and go seek the sealmaster’s palace seemed to need more time. Or less meal... The lamps blazed brightly on flushed and shining faces all around.

A babble of talk resolved in one man making some petition to their prince, who smiled and shook his head, but then made some compromise involving offering up Ottovin.

'They want tales,' Jokol whispered to Ingrey, as Ottovin rose and put one booted foot on the bench, and cleared his throat. 'We shall have many, this night.'

Now, a new drink was offered around. Ingrey sipped cautiously. This one tasted like pine needles and lamp oil, and even Jokol’s men took it in small glasses.

Ottovin launched into the sonorous speech of the islands, which seemed to bounce around the tent in rich rhythms. The dialect lay, maddeningly, just on the other side of Ingrey’s understanding, though recognizable words seemed to spring out of the stream here and there. Whether they were Wealdean cognates or just accidents of similar sound, Ingrey was not sure.

'He is telling the tale of Yetta and the three cows,' Jokol whispered to Ingrey. 'It is a favorite.'

'Can you translate it?' Ingrey whispered back.

'Alas, no.'

'Too difficult?'

Jokol’s blue eyes danced, and he blushed. 'Too filthy.'

'What, don’t you know all those short words?'

Jokol sniggered happily, leaned back, and crossed his legs, his hand tapping his knee keeping time to Ottovin’s voice. Ingrey realized that he’d just managed to make a joke. Across a language barrier. And had not even given offense. He smiled muzzily and took another sip of his liquid pine needles. The men crowding the benches and ranged along the walls laughed uproariously, and Ottovin bowed and sat, collecting his due drink; the custom seemed to involve tipping it back in one gulp. The islanders applauded, then began shouting at their prince, who acquiesced and rose in turn to his feet. After a rustling and murmur, the tent fell so silent Ingrey could hear the river waves lapping gently on the hull.

Jokol drew a deep breath and began. After the first few sentences, Ingrey realized he was listening to verse, rhythmic and alliterative. After the first few minutes, he realized that this was to be no short or simple offering.

'This is an adventure tale, good,' Ottovin confided to Ingrey in the usual behind-the-hand whisper. 'These days, it is hard to get anything but love stories out of him.'

The sound of Jokol’s voice washed over Ingrey like the rocking of a boat, a cradle, a horse’s stride. The beat never wavered; he never seemed to pause at a loss for a word or phrase. His listeners sometimes giggled, sometimes gasped, but most often sat as though enspelled, lips parted, the lamplight caressing their faces and gleaming from their eyes.

'He’s memorized all that?' Ingrey whispered in astonishment to Ottovin. And at the man’s slightly blank look, repeated, tapping his forehead, 'The words are all in his head?'

Ottovin smiled proudly. 'That and a hundred hundred more. Why do you think we call him Skullsplitter? He makes our heads burst with his tales. My sister Breiga will be the happiest of women, aye.'

Ingrey eased back on the bench, swallowed some more pine needles, and reflected on the nature of words. And presuppositions.

At astounding length, Jokol finished, to the enthusiastic applause of his men; they cheered as he knocked back his drink. He grinned sheepishly and waved away an immediate demand for more, with some vociferous debate over the selection. 'Soon, soon! It will be ready for you soon,' he promised, tapping his lips, and sat for a time, smiling absently.

One of the other men took a turn then, though not in verse this time; judging from the raucous laughter, it was another that Prince Jokol might be too shy to translate.

'Ah,' said Jokol, leaning close to Ingrey to refill his glass. 'You grow less glum. Good! Now I shall honor you with Ingorry’s Tale.'

He rose again, and seemed to settle into himself, his face growing solemn. He launched again into verse, serious and, at moments, even sinister, judging from the riveted looks of his listeners. In very short order, Ingrey realized Jokol was retelling the tale of the corrupted funeral, and of Ingrey’s rescue of the bear and the situation, for Ingrey’s own name, in Jokol’s rolling pronunciation, and that of Fafa, appeared often. The titles of the gods were quite distinct. And, to Ingrey’s dismay, so was the term weirding. Which, judging by the way the men’s eyes shifted to look warily at Ingrey, meant much the same thing in the island dialect as it did in the Weald.

Ingrey studied Jokol once more, considering the nature of a mind that could take his disaster of sunset and transmute it into heroic poetry by midnight. Extemporaneously. Or perhaps that was, into a campfire tale—the sort designed to send one’s spooked listeners off to bed, but not to sleep... If the sense was represented by the sound, Jokol’s observations had been more acute and detailed than Ingrey would have believed possible, not that his own had been exactly coherent. There seemed not to be any references to wolves, though.

The response when Jokol finished this time was not raucous applause but something more like a sigh of awe. It became a murmur of commentary and, Ingrey suspected from certain voices rising from the back row, interested critique. Jokol’s smile was more sly, this time, as he tipped back his glass.

The feast fragmented then, with more food and more drink forcibly circulating. Some men broke out bedrolls and seized corners, and rolled over to snore untrammeled by the noise; Ingrey wondered if they also slept through sea storms. Ottovin, a good lieutenant, averted potential disaster by forbidding the drunken axthrowing contest to have live targets. Jokol stretched his shoulders, eased his strained voice with another drink, and smiled at Ingrey in a curiosity that Ingrey returned full fold.

'Tomorrow night,' said Jokol, 'I will make them listen to a love story, in honor of my beautiful Breiga, or they shall get none. You are a young fellow like me, I think, Lord Ingorry. Do you love a one?'

Ingrey blinked, a bit owlishly. Hesitated. Claimed. 'Yes. Yes, I do.' Sat shocked to hear those words coming from his mouth, in this place. Curse that horse urine.

'Ah! That is a good thing. Happy man! But you do not smile. Does she not love you back?'

'I... don’t know. But we have other troubles.'

Jokol’s brows rose. 'Unwilling parents?' he inquired sympathetically.

'No. It’s not like... It’s... She may be under a death sentence.'

Jokol sat back, stunned serious. 'No! For why?'

It was the inebriated haze he was seeing everything through, Ingrey decided, that made this southern madman seem such a cheerful confidant, a brotherly repository of the most intimate fears of his heart. Maybe... maybe no one would remember these words in the morning. 'Have you heard of the death of Prince Boleso, the hallow king’s son?'

'Oh, aye.'

'She beat in his brains with his own war hammer.' This seemed too bald. He added by way of clarification, 'He was trying to rape her at the time.' The uncanny complications seemed beyond explanation, at the moment.