Seriously, Boss?
Okay,
I
don’t.
On the other hand, this wasn’t casual. I did try to talk to him. With no common language, and with no prompting from him to spark my memory, I was pretty much out of options.
I punched up a brief translation spell and tried again.
“Good afternoon.”
“Is it?” he asked. I realized that I understood him even without the spell, but actually assembling a coherent conversation in his language was going to be difficult, if it was possible for me at all. I’d have to rely on the spell, for now.
“Well, it’s a nice day. I’d like to think it’s a good afternoon.”
He grunted noncommittally. It was, actually. The weather was relatively warm, the breeze cool, and there might be a hint of rain to come hanging in the air.
“Could I trouble you to show me to whoever your leader is?”
He grunted again and walked away. Bronze followed him, since he was headed for the heavy, timber building. It was quite large, easily a hundred feet across, and probably intended to be circular. It actually had thirteen sides; I wondered if the number was significant. One of the sides was mostly door; Bronze went right in without trouble.
The interior was built to be open. A fire burned in a circular hearth in the center; a wide, raised walkway went all around the room. Another one, narrower and about ten or twelve feet higher, formed the “second floor.” A third one, even more narrow, was the top floor. The roof was open in the center to let the smoke out, but had a secondary roof over that hole, like a permanent umbrella, both to slow the escaping heat and to keep the rain out. The pillars in the walls and supporting the walkways were heavily carved, mainly with stylized faces.
On the far side of the fire sat three people. One was clearly a shaman, easily identified by the animal headdress and abundance of tattooed decoration. Another was a woman with light brown hair in an amazingly thick and heavy braid. The third was an older man, thick about the middle, thick wrists, thick beard, thick brows, and all his hair silver salted with iron.
Bronze stopped at the open hearth and we all looked at each other.
“Good afternoon,” I tried. They just looked at me. These people weren’t much for pleasantries. I’ve had warmer welcomes from people who wanted to kill me.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized, “but I don’t know the proper customs for greeting you and politely introducing myself. What should I do to meet and greet without offending?”
The man and the woman looked at each other. I think I succeeded in prompting them to react.
“Tell us who you are,” the man said.
“I’m called Halar.”
“What do you want?”
“I want people who will cross the river and raid the southern kingdom.”
“No,” he said. He shook his shaggy head. “The blood reavers don’t bring back much of value, not like in grandfather’s time. It’s not worth the trouble. They are of better use here.”
“Surely there are some who would go?”
“Oh, yes,” he admitted, gesturing dismissively. “Youths out for glory. You can’t bring back much in the way of animals or slaves on a raft.”
“In exchange for men to attack across the river,” I said, “I will give you a new bridge.”
They looked at me with stony expressions for several seconds.
“The bridge is broken, and the castle still guards it.”
“A new bridge,” I repeated, “without a castle to guard it.”
“Where?”
“East of here, near the mountains.”
“I have not been there.”
“The towns and cities often have mines; they have a lot of metal goods. They also have livestock and good harvests; the mountains shed water into their fields.”
He stroked his beard, running thick fingers through it.
“Why would you do this?”
“That’s a long story.”
He nodded, slowly.
“I am Hargus, master of this hall. This is my wife, Cymbell.” The lady nodded, still expressionless. “And this is Rakhill, the shaman.” The guy nodded, as well, but his expression was readable: hostility. “For three days, you are welcome here, Halar of the south.”
“And after three days?”
“We shall see.”
They may be a bunch of cold, unfriendly strangers, but once you get past that, they really know how to party.
Hargus called in two of his friends, Jorm and Garrick, and we all sat down at a giant table to eat, drink, be merry, and discuss the invasion of the south. As the day progressed, word spread to the farmsteads and people trickled in. By what I thought of as dinnertime, there must have been fifty men, about twice that number of women, and three times as many youngsters.
Footnote: I hate mead. I don’t even much care for beer. But I drink what I have to drink because it’s part of polite protocol. At least my living liver and kidneys work really well. I’ve already established that I’m not a cheap drunk.
There were three main groups of people who would instantly go south, bridge or no, if I promised them loot: young men seeking glory, blood reavers, and men whose farms and herds would only give them a lean winter. The first needed no explanation. The other two…
A blood reaver (
surropveetus
, “one who cleaves flesh and frees the blood”) is as close to a socially-acceptable homicidal maniac as I’ve ever seen. At best, they’re people with extremely poor impulse control and violent tendencies. They delight in killing and are, for the most part, kept around because they are usually very good at it. Why were violent killers tolerated so well? That leads us to the third category.
Households usually did pretty well over the summer. The growing season was short, but everything sprang up like it was in a hurry. Under normal circumstances, the
viksagi
—in their language, “the people of the north”—would do just fine. The problem was the ice giants.
I admitted that I’d never seen a giant. They were happy to tell me everything I could ever want to know.
Ice giants came in two main types. White giants lived farther north and looked very much as if they were carved from ice. They stood as much as four times the height of a man, but seldom came far enough south to encounter temperatures higher than sub-zero. Rarely, one might be seen wandering around in the winter, but they tended to mind their own business and the feeling was mutual.
The second type were the blue-skins. They superficially resembled human beings, but with pale-blue to sky-blue skin, usually tinged with white, and hair that always looked as though it had been washed and left outside overnight in a snowstorm. They stood between two or three times a man’s height and were broader and thicker than a proportional human. They used primitive weapons—clubs and rocks, mostly—and seemed to take great delight in eating warm-bloods. For their purposes, “warm-bloods” included anything with a body temperature above freezing, including all the usual farm animals and humans.
The
viksagi
did their best to fight them off with superior weapons—swords, axes, other edged things, as well as flaming arrows; blue-skins hate fire. Dealing with a stocky, eighteen-foot-tall giant wielding a small tree for a club can be problematic, though.
I began to see why the
viksagi
raided south over the Averill. The giants ate them out of house and home. And livestock. And sometimes each other. It started to explain the ratio between grown men and women, too. I also started to see why having a few manic killing machines around might be regarded as acceptable. Someone needs to run screaming up to a blueskin and try to hack its kneecap off while archers put flaming arrows into its face.
In more prosperous times, of course, blood reavers tended to get restless, hence their willingness to head south and find someone to eat. I mean, “kill.” Unlike blueskins, they seldom actually
ate
anyone, but they had no compunctions about biting a chunk out of an adversary—probably how that rumor got started.
Has anyone ever actually talked to the
viksagi
before? Did anyone else south of the Averill know about the ice giants? Under normal circumstances, I’d be considering how to beat the blueskins into submission and convince them to leave these people alone. At the moment, I was trying to be a king, not a Hero. I wanted the
viksagi
willing to raid south and bother Byrne.
I didn’t like it. Not one bit.
There was a story I heard when I was teaching on campus—probably not true—about a theology professor. In one class, a student asked her how she could reconcile a benevolent and loving god with the fact of infant mortality, cancer, and just bad things happening to good people. Her answer was along the lines of, “God, in His public capacity, sometimes has to do things which, in His personal and private capacity, He finds deplorable.”
Kings apparently have the same problem.
We discussed the idea of a new bridge; I admitted that I could probably put it wherever they wanted, which made Rakhill lean forward.
“How?”
“How? I can build a bridge. Someone built the one in front of Crag Keep. Why not build another?”
“You know how to build a bridge that big?”
“Sure. It’s just a lot of stones piled on stones.”
And some engineering principles you would probably think of as magic.
But I didn’t say that.
“I want to see you build a bridge.”
“If we get enough people to go south, you will.”
He didn’t like that. I think he was suspicious of me. I’m going to blame that on Bronze and Firebrand; they aren’t exactly subtle, as far as magical items go. It might have been a case of artifact jealousy.
In between our discussions, I got invited to play some games. They were, without exception, violent and dangerous.
One of them involved getting a log, placing it across one’s shoulders, holding it there with both arms, and swinging it at a similarly-equipped opponent. Whoever was knocked down first was the loser. I was good at that one. Superior strength and body mass. Very helpful.
Another was a game of poles. A dozen logs were placed in holes around the room and stood upright. The objective of the game was to go from one side of the building to the other, jumping from the second-storey level to the top of a pole, then to another pole, and so on until reaching the other side. It was legal, by the way, to make contact with your fellow racers. I wasn’t so good at that one.
In general, I think I acquitted myself well in their games. They seemed to be more open after each game, more friendly, and maybe a bit more respectful, too. One of them, Provur, kept slapping me on the back like he was trying to knock me down and telling me what a solid little man I was. That seemed fair; he was at least four inches taller than I and half again as wide.
I wasn’t seriously hurt, just a bit bruised and battered. It would take care of itself after sundown.
Hargus explained that getting together a serious raiding party was going to require that bridge. The whole purpose of any major trip across the river was to get stuff. While portable wealth was nice—gold jewelry was popular, as were weaponry and tools—there was a major river to consider. The really useful stuff, like sacks of grain, cattle and pigs, or barrels of anything, were high-volume, high-weight loot. You didn’t just grab a cow and stuff it in a sack. You drove it north, across a bridge, or you didn’t bother.
“We don’t really care about killing you lot,” he told me, grinning through his beard. “We just want the things you have.”
“Except for blood reavers?”
“Except for them. They’re born with blood-madness, so they don’t count.”
“Fair enough.”
Bronze garnered a fair amount of attention, which was understandable. She didn’t appreciate it, but she took it like a trooper. Or, rather, like a statue. She just stood by the door and waited with all the patience of a giant piece of metal.
“You rode here on that thing?” one man asked. He didn’t seem belligerent, just curious.
“Yes,” I admitted. “Her name is Bronze.”
“It doesn’t move.”
“Bronze,” I called. She lifted her head, looked at me, then walked carefully to me and put her head over my shoulder. I patted her neck. My inquisitor nodded, apparently satisfied. Bronze
whuffed
hot air in my hair:
Are we going to be here much longer?
“I have no idea.”
Bronze walked back over to her spot beside the door and held still again.
Firebrand, on the other hand, grunted.
What?
I asked.
Someone’s messing with me, Boss. Off to the right.
What are they doing?
I asked, looking for the source. Rakhill was looking intently at me while rubbing some bones together in one hand.
Feels like a close scrutiny. It’s not a problem, but it’s like sticking your nose against someone to look at their eye. I don’t like it.
I smiled at Rakhill and walked over to him. He put the bones into a pouch immediately and stood up to meet me.
“Is there a reason you’re casting spells at my sword?” I asked, trying to be pleasant.
“Yes.” At least he didn’t try to deny it.
“I’m not sure of the customs here, but where I come from, it’s rude.”
He shrugged.
“Okay, let me try this another way,” I said. “I’m offended.”
“So?”
I didn’t have a good answer for that, so I worked my way through the place, looking for Hargus. I ran into Cymbell, first, though.
“Excuse me, please. I need to ask a question about your customs.”
“Yes?”
“If the shaman offends me, what’s the proper course of action? Do I backhand him to the floor? Do I challenge him to a duel? Or do I just tell him not to do it again and hope he listens?”
“Are you a shaman?”
“Where I come from, it’s called a wizard. Not exactly the same thing, but close.”
“You are?” she asked, surprised.
“Yes.”
“Then you can challenge him to a shaman’s duel, if you like.”