Dave Duncan – The Living God – A Handful of Men. Book 4

With pale face and clenched fists, Vork did as the skald had told him. Head high, arms stiff, he marched the length of the hall, through the lesser folk sprawling on the floor in the sunlight, all the way to the tables where the thanes and warriors sat, until he stood before Thane Drakkor himself. There he proclaimed that he was Atheling Vork, son of Thane Kragthong of Spithfrith, son of as many successive forebears as he remembered, and he came in peace to this hall. In conclusion, he issued formal notice that Gark’s enemies would henceforth have him to look out for, also, at which a widespread titter was barely suppressed. With his red hair flaming bright above his skinny pale neck, he looked absurdly young to be playing the role he had assumed, and his voice remained relentlessly treble.

“If he pours you a horn of mead, of course, you’re safe,”

Twist had promised. “If he throws it in your face, you’re a dead man. If he tells you to go and eat . . . well, there’s still hope.”

Drakkor glowered at Vork as if he had never seen him before, and then pointed with his dagger at the hearths and told him to go eat with the churls.

As for Gath . . . “You want to announce yourself as thane of Krasnegar, lad? That’s suicide—his father died denying that claim. As son of Thane Rap, a faun half-man? As son of Thane Inosolan, a woman?”

Gath bristled. He thought son of Rap Thaneslayer, and discarded that idea quickly. “As his kinsman, then? As the imperor’s messenger?”

Twist shrugged his hump. “It would be safer that you not reveal yourself at all.”

Gath assumed he meant the athelings’ exhibition matches. “I’m not afraid of a fight!”

Twist smiled so wide that he drooled. “With the Covin? It will be sending watchers to the moot, you know. May even have one on Seadragon, I haven’t looked them over yet.”

“You mean I’ve come all this way—”

“And you want to go all that way back, don’t you? So you’ll stay just a water boy, and you won’t be going to the moot! Which would you rather be: Vork-son-of-Kragthong in Drakkor’s clutches, or Gath-son-of-Rap in Zinixo’s?” He cackled.

The Covin was the danger. The Covin was the enemy, and for all Gath knew he might have already muddled up some plans of Dad’s with his meddling. The Covin might be the real reason why Mom and the imperor had decided not to come. And yet, although royal honors had never meant anything to Gath before, now that he was being denied them, they suddenly felt important for the first time in his life. Growling, he agreed that he would sit among the groundlings, for the moment.

He slunk into the hall to watch Vork’s entrance and subsequent humiliation. He felt somewhat better after that, and went to join him at the spits for a slab of roast goat and some cheering up. A couple of Blood Wave’s crew spotted their two tyros and decided to fill them both with peasant beer. They were prepared to use force if necessary, but Gath was not in a mood to argue—he needed to assert his manhood, even if it was only by getting drunk. Events blurred very quickly after that. There was much roast goat and fresh black bread, and some singing, and buckets and buckets of green beer. There was a sort of a fight between Gath and a lanky youth from the thorp, but they were both far too blurred to do any damage. There was falling down and throwing up. There was helping to drag out the drunks to make room in the hall.

There was waking up much later in the grass and going back inside again for more goat, and more green beer, and seeing different visiting thanes at the high table, and more useless windmilling fighting, over and over and over. The sun never set.

And in among all this insanity, there were moments of serious business.

After Thane Trakrog departed, and before Thanes Jorvir and Griktor arrived, Thane Drakkor went back down to the beach and hammered Gismak and Grablor into insensibility, one after the other. A captain must discipline his crew.

There were also moments of rapture, when the thane’s skald sang for the guests. In the hall Twist wore breeches like everybody else and his deformities were cruelly exposed. He was jeered at, had things thrown at him and tipped over him, but when he sat down and touched his harp and began to sing, then even the snoring stopped.

It was impossible for that crumpled body to produce such sound or those tangled teeth to hurl such words, and yet the skald filled the hall with pearls and rubies of song.

He sang of death and sorrowing. He sang of legendary heroes and great disasters. Most often he sang of Kalkor, Thane Drakkor’s father, former owner of this hall, sacker of cities. Gath thought the endless recitals of loot sounded very much like his own father’s shopping lists for the spring fleet, but fortunately he was never quite drunk enough to say so.

There were moments of muddled worrying. Twist’s news about the goblins was horrifying—Kadie, Kadie! Gath tried not to think about that, but there were hundreds of other things he should be worrying about, and most of the time he couldn’t keep a thought in his head for more than a few seconds before it drowned.

Yes, he had accomplished more or less what he had set out to do, in that he had made contact with a Nordland sorcerer—and apparently Warlock Olybino’s proclamation had made his trip unnecessary anyway. The moot itself would not be crucial, if Twist would organize the other sorcerers. There must be others, many others. But was Twist going to cooperate? That was something Gath could not establish. The skald was rarely available for talk, and when he was, Gath’s teeth and tongue refused to cooperate with his brain.

Probably a wise decision.

About the second or third time Gath heard him, Twist sang a different song. He sang of Thane Thermond, venerable, vulnerable, being challenged at the Nintor Moot. His sons had been delayed by a storm; who would save the noble thane from the challenge of virile Atheling Koddor?

Then stepped forward Atheling Drakkor, exiled by a brother’s spite, landless sailor in another’s ship; eight and ten years only and untried with the ritual ax. He would be champion for the hard-pressed thane.

The tale could not hold much drama after that, Gath thought. When two men entered the Place of Ravens for a reckoning, one left his bones on the grass for ever. Had the loser been Thermond’s champion, then the old man would have had to go forward also and bow his neck for the victor’s stroke. In this case the outcome was fairly predictable, with Drakkor himself sitting there in full view. The story unfolded as Gath expected. Axes clashed, gore spurted, and the overambitious Koddor fell headless. Thus venerable Thermond was saved—end of tale.

So that had been Future-Thane Drakkor’s first reckoning? He had risked his life for a stranger? Interesting!

“I do not understand,” Vork complained, “how a man can be a sorcerer and look like that monster.”

The boys were dragging their feet down to the shore. They had been persuaded that the best remedy for a hangover was to dip oneself totally in the Winter Ocean and then run all the way back up to the hall. Gath would have more faith in the proposed remedy if he could see anyone older than himself applying it. On the other hand, he was desperate enough to try anything. He felt as if he was walking on his eyeballs.

“He’s a jotunn.”

“So?”

Gath didn’t want to talk at all. “How do they feel about sorcery? We feel, I mean.” When in Nordland be a jotunn. Vork sniffed. “Sailors are so frightened of bad luck that they won’t even talk about it. Warriors think it’s cowardice and cheating.”

Exactly!

They stopped simultaneously, toes at the water line. Very cold ripples ran up on the shingle.

“So?” Gath said. “If Twist turns himself into a muscle-boy raider like his brother, he’s cheating. His friends would spurn him and flee in panic.”

“Friends?” Vork shouted in his piercing treble. “They knock him down in the mud and spit on him!”

Why could he not see it as Gath saw it? “But they are still his people. He could live as a king in the Impire, but that isn’t what he wants. This is his home. This is his life. And he is his brother’s skald.”

“What can that mean to a sorcerer?”

“You haven’t been paying attention,” Gath said smugly.

“Oh, no? See that piece of driftwood out there? I’ll race you to it.”

“Right! Go!”

Vork plunged into the icy water.