ii) A curious visitor
Ragnarson clumped downstairs into the dining hall and peered into its gloomy corners. It was vast. This place was both home and fortress. It housed nearly a hundred people in troubled times. He shivered. No one had kindled the morning fires. "Ragnar! Where's he at?"
His son popped from the narrow, easily defended hallway to the front door. "Outside. He won't come in."
"Eh? Why?"
The boy shrugged.
"Well, if he won't, he won't." As he strode to the door, Ragnarson snatched an iron-capped club from a weapons rack.
Outside, in the pale misty light of a morning hardly begun, an old, old man waited. He leaned on a staff, stared at the ground thoughtfully. His bearing was not that of a beggar. Ragnarson looked for a horse, saw none.
The ancient had neither pack nor pack animal, either. "Well, what can I do for you?"
A smile flashed across a face that seemed as old as the world. "Listen."
"Eh?" Bragi grew uneasy. There was something about this fellow, a presence...
"Listen. Hear, and act accordingly. Fear the child with the ways of a woman. Beware the bells of a woman's fingers. All magicks aren't in the hands of sorcerers." Ragnarson started to interrupt, found that he could not. "Covet not the gemless crown. It rides the head precariously. It leads to the place where swords are of no avail." Having said his cryptic piece, the old man turned to the track leading toward the North Road, the highway linking Itaskia and Iwa Skolovda.
Ragnarson frowned. He was not a slow-witted man. But he was unaccustomed to dealing with mystery-mouthed old men in the sluggish hours of the morning. "Who the hell are you?" he thundered.
Faintly, from the woods:
"Old as a mountain,
Lives on a star,
Deep as the ocean flows."
Ragnarson pursued fleas through his beard. A riddle. Well. A madman, that's what. He shrugged it off. There was breakfast to eat and the ride to Mocker's to be made. No time for crazies.
iii) Things she loves and fears
Elana, who had overheard, could not shrug it off. She feared its portent, that Bragi was about to tie off on some hare-brained venture.
From a high window she stared at the land and forest they had conquered together. She remembered. They had come late in the year to a land-grant so remote that they had had to cut a path in. That first winter had been cold and hard. The winds and snows pouring over the
Kratchnodians had seemed bent on revenge for the disasters wrought there the winter previous, in Bragi's last campaign. The blood of children and wolves had christened the new land.
The next year there had been a flare-up of the ancient boundary dispute between Prost Kamenets and Itaskia. Bandits, briefly legitimatized by letters of marquee from Prost Kamenets, had come over the Silverbind. Many hadn't gone home, but the land had also drunk the blood of its own.
The third had been the halcyon year. Their friends Nepanthe and Mocker had been able to break loose and take a grant of their own.
Things had turned bad again late in the fourth year, when drought east of the Silverbind had driven men from Prost Kamenets into a brigandry their government ignored as long as its thrust lay across the river. Near the rear of the house, the granary stood in charred ruins. A half-mile away the men were rebuilding the sawmill. There were contracts for timber to be delivered to the naval yards at Itaskia. Those had to be met first.
Counting wives and children, there had been twenty-two pioneers. Most were dead now, buried in places of honor beside the great house. She and Bragi had been lucky, their only loss a daughter born dead.
Too many graves in the graveyard. Fifty-one in all. Over the years old followers of Bragi's and friends of hers had drifted in, some to stay a day or two out of a journey in search of a war, some to settle and die.
The grain was sprouting, the children were growing, the cattle were getting fat. There was an orchard that might produce in her lifetime. She had a home almost as large and comfortable as the one Bragi had promised her during all those years under arms. And it was all endangered. She knew it in her bones. Something was afoot, something grim.
Her gaze went to the graveyard. Old Tor Jack lay in the corner, beside Randy Will who had gotten his skull crushed pulling Ragnar from between a stallion and a mare in heat. What would they think if Bragi threw it up now?
Jorgen Miklassen, killed by a wild boar. Gudrun Ormsdatter, died in childbirth. Red Lars, brought down by wolves. Jan and Mihr Krushka. Rafnir Shagboots, Walleyed Marjo, Tandy the Gimp.
Blood and tears, blood and tears. Nothing would bring them back. Why so morbidly thoughtful? Break yourself out, woman. Time goes on, work has to be done. What man hath wrought, woman must maintain.
Maxims did nothing to cheer her. She spent the day working hard, seeking an exhaustion that would extinguish her apprehensions.
In the evening, as twilight's pastels were fading into indigo, a huge owl came out of the east, flew thrice round the house widdershins, dipping and dancing with owls from beneath the greathouse eaves. It soon fled toward Mocker's.
"Another omen." She sighed.
iv) Mocker and Nepanthe of Ravenkrak
Mocker's holding lay hip by thigh with Ragnarson's. Both were held under Itaskian Crown Charter. On his own territory each had the power and responsibility of a baron—without the privileges. Though neighbors, both found distance between homes a convenience. They had been friends since the tail-end years of the El Murid wars, but each found the other's extended company insufferable. The disparity in their values kept them constantly on the simmering edge. A day's visit, a night's drinking and remembering when, that was their limit. Neither was known for patience, nor for an open mind.
Ragnarson covered the distance before dinner, pretending that once again he was racing El Murid from Hellin Daimiel to Libiannin.
Mocker wasn't surprised to see him. Little astonished that fat old reprobate.
Ragnarson reined in beside a short, swarthy fellow on his knees in mud. Laugh lines permanently marked his moon-round brown face. "Hai!" he cried. "Great man-bears! Help!" Tenants came running, grabbing weapons. The fat man rose and whirled madly, dark eyes dancing.
A boy the age of Bragi's Ragnar ran from a nearby smokehouse, toy bow ready. "Oh. It's only Uncle Bear."
"Only?" Bragi growled as he dismounted. "Only? Maybe, Ethrian, but mean enough to box the ears of a cub." He seized the boy, threw him squealing into the air.
Wiping her hands on her apron, a woman came from the nearby house. Nepanthe always seemed to be wiping her hands. Mocker left a mountain of woman's work wherever he passed. "Bragi. Just in time for dinner. You came alone? I haven't seen Elana since..." Her smile faded. Since the bandit passage last fall, when Mocker's dependents had holed up in Ragnarson's stronger greathouse.
"Pretty as ever, I see," said Ragnarson. He handed his reins to Ethrian, who scowled, knowing he was being gotten rid of. Nepanthe blushed. She was indeed attractive, but hardly pretty as ever. The forest years had devoured her aristocratic delicacy. Still, she looked younger than thirty-four. "No, couldn't bring the family."
"Business?" She did most of Mocker's talking. Mocker had never mastered the Itaskian tongue. His vanity was such that he avoided speaking whenever he could. Ragnarson was not sure that inability was genuine. It varied according to some formula known only to Mocker himself.
"No. Just riding. Spring fever." Shifting to Necrem-nen, an eastern language in which Mocker was more at home, he continued, "Strange thing happened this morning. Old man appeared out of nowhere, mumbled some nonsense about girls who act like women. Wouldn't answer a question straight out, only in riddles. Weirdest thing is, I couldn't find a trace of him on the road. You'd think there'd be fresh droppings, coming or going."