The Black Prince: Part I (10 page)

Hart’s fine raiment and lack of foul personal odor had drawn great comment from their new companions. Who also viewed Callas as similarly, to use Bjorn’s term,
woman-like
. Bjorn had asked earlier, with no rancor, if Hart and Callas bedded each other regularly.

Hart had not deigned to reply.

One of the other tribesmen had offered to shoot Hart a stoat, so he could rub it on himself and smell less like a woman.

Hart knew that the tribesmen favored the habit of hunting while robed in freshly killed animals. Especially stoats, whose scent glands emitted an odor so awful as to fell a grown man to his knees. Doing so masked their own scents, and thus their presence from potential prey. Hart supposed, as he now considered the issue, that this tactic might work in hunting men also. Although if the rebels did have spies, or at least the foresight to send scouts into the passes, they’d Hardly be likely to mistake Hart for an especially large rodent.

He smiled slightly.

“Ah,” Bjorn agreed, “my mother’s breasts are large and milky white. She’s given birth to eight babies, and my father still sings their praises.”

Callas suppressed a choking noise.

“Eight?” Hart asked.

“Aye! And fine sons all. None as fine as Bjorn, though.”

“Let me guess.” Callas turned in his saddle. “You sired the others with her.”

Bjorn let out another roaring laugh.

They’d reached a narrow, deep channel that, due to the force of the current, hadn’t frozen. The water was perfectly clear, roiling in on itself over a ribbon of rounded stones, but silent. The noise of its passing was absorbed by the snow.

Dismounting, Hart strode to the bank. Those stones nearest that breached the water’s surface were mounded in white. Not too deep, then. They wouldn’t need to look for another place to cross. He glanced skyward again. A good thing.

“This water is too deep,” Bjorn said, beside him.

Hart glanced at his companion. The tribesman moved surprisingly quietly, when he wanted to. And his tone had changed. Grown speculative. He didn’t seem nervous, precisely, but he was clearly disturbed. By something.

“This tarn feeds from higher up.” He gestured. “There should be little water, in this month. Not this much until Flowers Month.” He paused again, and then shook his head. “Molag sits above this tarn. Molag and her sister village, Altag.”

Hart nodded slowly. He understood what Bjorn was saying and understood, too, for the first time why Bjorn had been elected leader of the contingent of tribesmen who’d come to join them. Someone, or rather a group of them, was melting snow for cooking high above them. Cooking, and washing, and who knew what else. Perhaps clearing snow from the ground to make room for weapons practice.

Either way, there were more people in Molag than usual.

Hart, returning to his horse, swung back into the saddle. His gaze met Bjorn’s, a man he now studied with new eyes. Perhaps there was a reason Owen Silverbeard had placed so much faith in this man, time and time again. Owen Silverbeard, who wasn’t nearly as old as his name suggested. He was, in fact, quite young to be a chief. But he’d beaten his competitors handily, winning the election by a landslide. An election that took place after what was known as a chief’s moot, a tournament of speeches, creative problem solving, and feats of strength. Some lasted mere days while others, weeks. According to Bjorn, one had lasted a year.

They crossed the tarn in silence.

Hart’s sense of unease had not abated.

Bjorn led them to a campsite that, he assured Hart, was “suitable for girls.”

After dismounting and hobbling the horses, they began to clear the snow. The work was hard and soon Hart could feel himself sweating through his shirt. Regardless of what Bjorn and his men might claim, after five nights in the saddle there was no need for that stoat.

He thrust his shovel into a snowdrift and then, pressing his knuckles into the small of his back, stretched to ease the tension there.

Callas was digging a hole for the fire. Building the fire beneath ground would do much to hide the flames from inquiring eyes. The smoke, too.

Hart had come to understand that Bjorn’s coarse and often inappropriate humor was a means of easing the tension they all felt. By this point, Hart half expected to feel an arrow in his back at any moment. A tingling spot had developed, right between his shoulder blades.

He sat down by the fire, using one of his saddlebags as a bench, and studied his surroundings in the fading light. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to eat, and drink, and snatch a few hours’ sleep. But, most of all, he wanted to be alone. To ponder, and to pray for guidance. To his new lord, and to the only lord who’d ever answered his prayers.

Strangely, he caught himself thinking about Lissa.

Who was, he decided with some humor, undoubtedly pleasuring one of the town’s fatter merchants at that precise moment. While he was here, keeping time with an equally revolting man. Bjorn Treesinger, who still hadn’t explained his surname, was chatting with his horse. Who appeared to be genuinely enjoying the attention.

The man might be intelligent, he might not be about to get Hart killed after all, but he’d never be likeable.

Above him, the tall pines seemed to grow together. Like skeletal fingers, reaching toward some center point. A steel gray sky that promised more snow was fading into black.

He’d lain in the forest near home, outside of Barghast, staring up at the sky as it snowed. The contrast of white on black was stunning. Ghostlike. He felt like he’d entered another world. The snow falling made the tops of the trees appear to be shrouded in mist.

Sitting up, finally, cold and covered in snow, he hadn’t noticed. Or cared. He’d felt nothing so much as a sense of exhilaration.

This was his home, and he
would
defend it.

He made a silent promise to his God.

An errant gust of wind blew through the trees. The fire crackled. There was still no noise.

“Summer child.” Bjorn settled in beside him. “Have you no testicles?”

Hart jumped. “What?”

Callas erupted in laughter. The wretch. The other men were sharing their own fire. No man wanted to eat with his master. Rather, he wanted to relax. Hart wished he could relax.

“I…what?” He felt like such a fool. Couldn’t he come up with a better response? Callas and Bjorn both must think him an idiot. And was there nothing else to discuss on this cursed trek through the wilderness other than his manhood?

Bjorn patted him affectionately on the cheek. “So smooth. Like a baby’s. Or a woman’s. Like a woman’s posteriors!” He cackled.

“I shave.” Why wasn’t Callas saving him?

Callas, opening his flask, appeared to be settling in for a show.

Bjorn began to serve out their supper, thick slabs of a revolting combination of inedibles called
black pudding
. Blood, milk, suet and oatmeal were heated together until they formed a paste thick enough to congeal when cooled. Into a sort of hideous, eggplant-colored log. Bjorn flavored his with pennyroyal, making it, in his mind, a delicacy above all others. Hart felt his gorge rise, but allowed no outward sign of discomfort. He’d be damned if Bjorn would call him a girl again.

Bjorn, for his own part, fell to with gusto. “How do you attract the women,” he asked, mid-chew, “when they can scarcely tell the difference between you and themselves?”

“By taking his pants off,” Callas volunteered.

Now
he spoke.

“Right there, in the public square? You approach a strange woman and drop your braies?” Bjorn seemed entirely too interested. “Do you not get killed for such a thing? No tribeswoman,” he added, “would stand for such disrespect.” Bjorn swilled some ale, and spat.

“What?” Hart said stupidly.

“The woman picks you. All men know that.”

“Then you must be single.”

“I have three wives!” Bjorn grinned, exposing his teeth again. “Three wives and eleven children, seven of them boys.”

“There might be something to that stoat suggestion.”

Hart shot Callas a murderous look.

“What!” Callas threw up his hands. “You’re the one who wants to get married.”

“You are not married?” Bjorn seemed stunned by this revelation.

“Er, no.”

“Have you no women at all?”

“I, ah….” Hart trailed off, miserable.

“Do you not
care
for women?”

“Oh, I care for them.”

“Perhaps if you sang them songs, instead of dropping your—”

“Back in his first home, before he came North and became my blood brother,” Callas informed Bjorn, “he slept most nights with a pig. A pig to which he gave quite a pretty name.”

“Ah.” Bjorn pondered this information. And then, “ah.”

“Callas,” Hart replied, “has no intention of ever getting married.”

Bjorn’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “None? Then
you
must have no testicles.”

“Let’s drop
his
braies and look.”

“Now I’ll have you know—”

“Callas,” Hart said confidentially, leaning in closer to Bjorn, “has sworn an oath of devotion to the Gods to remain pure.”

Callas’ eyes widened.

Bjorn sat back, his massive hands on his knees. “Well no wonder,” he said, a tone of awe in his voice, “you city dwellers need our help.”

T
hey crept toward Molag.

Overhead, the moon was reaching its zenith. Soon, it would begin to set. There was still no sound.

Molag was a decent-sized settlement, boasting several families. Among the clans,
family
was a loosely defined term. Each longhouse consisted, not of one husband and wife couple but of several. Usually at least one half of each couple was related, in some manner, to at least one other person under the same roof: meaning that five brothers might live together, all with their families, or some mixture of brothers, sisters, and cousins. A man might build a longhouse for him and his brothers, and then find one morning that his wife’s cousin’s sister in law—the cousin still living several settlements away—had turned up on his doorstep, claiming kinship and its protections.

Which meant that a village of even three longhouses could hold a sizeable population indeed, of four score or more individuals.

Molag had something in the order of ten longhouses, each of them from twenty to thirty spans wide and as long as several hundred. Although most were not so grand. In terms of structure, the traditional longhouse was supported by two marching rows of columns. Thus, the interior was divided into three long aisles. Wood was scarce in the mountains, mostly used for much-needed heat. Which meant that rare was the longhouse constructed entirely of wood. The walls and roof were, rather, usually constructed of turf. Or, in the case of wealthier families, stone.

Tribal settlements resembled nothing of the villages Hart was used to. Rather than a town square with a marketplace, shops, and other public spaces, they tended to be more elaborate farm settlements. Even crafters tended to work from home, vending their goods there also. The only non-residential buildings were grain silos and the occasional barn.

A circumstance, which made attack convenient: large groups of men, all huddled together for warmth.

Provided no one anticipated their coming.

Family bonds were all among the clans, as they were throughout the North. Far more so than in the South, where fair weather allowed men to become more independent. Or at least think of themselves as such. In the South, men were bonded to another not by loyalty, or even blood but by law: serf to lord, apprentice to master. Each man owed allegiance, even to the point of sacrificing his life, to the man above him.

Among the clans, no man had a master. Even the chief was only a first among equals, elected by his peers and on occasion deposed by those same peers. Men were, rather, brothers. Marriage, rather than oaths of fealty, was the means by which families formed alliances. Because becoming family was understood as the greatest commitment of all.

Unsurprisingly, then, there were other means of forming this bond. When, the night before, Callas had referred to Hart as his blood brother, he’d been using the Northern term for a created bond that was as sacred as marriage. Each man cut himself on the palm of his sword hand before clasping it with his fellow, commingling their blood as he swore an oath of vengeance on the other’s life. The ceremony that Hart had undergone had been somewhat…different, but the effect had been the same. He and Callas were bonded for life. He and the North were bonded—in this life and the next.

The Northmen lacked the obsessive concern with a man’s parentage that shaped life in the South. Didn’t understand it. They accepted that family—by birth or no—was a choice. And one that each man must make, as an individual, anew each morn.

The men who crept along beside Hart did so, not from bondage but for love. A man, Hart had learned over the last few seasons, would do things for love that he would never do, simply because a man who called himself
lord
demanded that it be done. He might be compelled to fight, because theirs was a world of competing obligations, but he could not be made to
sacrifice
. To yearn for victory as a drowning man yearned for air.