In the morning, after a few dark hours of wakefulness or nightmare—he was unsure which—Eodan rose to take up his officer's duties. The Pontines would start home at dawn the next day; though the army itself could have struck camp in an hour, its train of plunder, captives and tribute was something else. Eodan was glad enough to lose himself in a whirl of horses. Now and then he glimpsed the Romans, fully armed before their little resting place—no more than a decury, and yet they had crossed half Asia to make a demand upon the king in his host. It came to him, even in his anger, that he was honored to have one child who would be Roman.
This day was also cold and blustering. Dust flew about his boots, up into his eyes and nose and gullet; the clash of iron and brass had a somehow wintry sound. Up over the Axylon bulked monstrous blue-black clouds with rain or snow in their bellies, but the earth remained mummy-dry. Tent canvas cracked in the wind.
About mid-morning Eodan saw a royal runner weave between the mules whose roundup he was overseeing. He thought nothing of it until the boy plucked at his foot. Then he looked down from the saddle and heard: "Master Captain, the king commands your instant attendance."
"I hear and obey," said Eodan's training. He snapped an order to a younger horseman to continue the task and trotted through the scurry of the camp. Inwardly he felt a tightening. What would the ruler want of him now?
When he yielded his sword he felt wholly alone. He had not even a mail-coat today, only dirt-streaked tunic and breeches in the Persian manner, a plumed helmet to mark his rank. The guards at the gate squinted against wind and dust, making their faces somehow inhuman. Eodan crossed the courtyard and entered the keep.
The hall was nearly empty; one never thought of the rigid troopers around the walls, of the secretary with tablet and stylus or the runners crouched at his feet. Mithradates paced before a fire-pit, where flame welled up. He himself was Persian clad; a ruby upon his brow gleamed like a red third eye. He wore a dagger at his hip; from time to time he half drew it and then snicked it back into the sheath as though into an enemy's heart.
Eodan advanced until he caught the royal glance and made his usual obeisance.
"Down on your face, barbarian!" roared Mithradates.
That was no moment to haggle about pride. Eodan threw himself flat. "How have I offended My Lord?" The upsurge of his own wrath came to him as a shock. He had thought this man was his friend.
"Where is the woman Phryne?" the voice thundered over his head.
Eodan leaped to his feet. "Is she gone?" he shouted.
"I gave you no command to rise," growled Mithradates.
"Is she gone?" yelled the Cimbrian again, out of a feeling that fire had touched him.
Mithradates stared at him for a long while. Slowly, the king's visage softened. "Then you do not know?" he asked quietly.
"By my father's ghost, Lord, I swear I do not."
"Hear, then. Her maids entered her tent this morning to help her arise. She was not there. The eunuch on guard says he knows nothing. I believe him, though he shall still drink poison for his stupidity, and be pardoned only if my new antidote saves him. There was a hole in the tent, at the rear; she must have slashed it with a knife among her possessions. When word of this finally came to me, I had inquiries made. An under-groom of your own, Cimbrian, says she came to him in the night, demanding horses, clothing, arms and food, and rode off. He says he had received orders to give her whatever she wished without question."
"That is true, Great King, but—I never thought—I never—Why would she have gone, whose destiny had just blossomed?"
"And into the Axylon! She was last seen riding south on the road into the Axylon!"
"Surely there is witchcraft here," said Eodan. "She never showed any sign of madness, Lord. An evil spirit must have seized her, or some spell—"
Inwardly, coldly, his mind raced and dodged, like a hare with wolves behind. He did not know what might haunt these dreary plains; perhaps she was indeed harried out by a troll. He was thinly surprised that he did not cower at the thought, as once he would have done, but wished only to find that creature and sink iron into it. Yet maybe she had done this of her own will, for some reason unknown to him. He found it hard to imagine his cool Phryne, who knew what the stars were made of, seized by some misshapen Phrygian shadow; or was it just that he dared not imagine it?
Whatever the truth, he wanted to go after her himself. No yapping Asiatics would carry her back in ropes to the king's bed. It was not meet!
Eodan's green gaze narrowed upon Mithradates. He saw the terrors of a thousand generations, who had muttered in dark huts and brewed magic against a world they peopled with demons, flit over the lion-face. Let him dissect as many criminals and cast as many learned horoscopes as he wished; Mithradates remained only half a Greek.
"They deal in black arts here," said the king. His finger traced a sign against evil, the Cross of Light that stood on the banners of Mithras. "I'll hale the wizard we saw up onto a rack before this hour is out."
A scheme sprang into Eodan's head. His heart leaped with it.
"Or the Romans?" he said.
"What? No, their law forbids magic."
"I have seen much Roman law broken by Romans, Great Master. Also, this may not be sorcery after all; it may be some trick of theirs."
Mithradates whirled on a runner. "Bring me the Flavius," he rapped.
Thereafter he paced, up and down, up and down; the only noise being his boots thudding, the fire that hissed in the pits and the wind whining outside. There was much smoke in the hall today; it stung tears from Eodan's eyes.
He thought back to the night before ... how small she had been, under the tower which was the king ... and why had she been so afraid that his displeasure with her might be visited on her comrades? When the king tired of a concubine, even if she had only been with him one night, he did not rage about it. He always had enough women. He gave her to some noble, as a special mark of favor, and of course the noble would never be anything but gentle toward such a token. Usually he made her his chief wife. So Phryne's luck had come golden to roost on her shoulder, by the mere fact of a royal command to bed.
Yet she had looked upon Eodan with desolation. And she had thrown him a final furtive word, not to trouble himself about her, for she would do what was best.
He thought, stiffening: It was so little to her liking, to enter a harem, that she rode forth alone. Out there is a land of wolf, bear, lynx and herdsmen wilder than they; south are Lycaonia and Parthia, where a woman is also only an animal. If she is not slain along the way, there will come a time when she must turn her dagger against herself.
Flavius entered. "Hail, King of the East," he said. He saw Eodan and stopped. The Cimbrian remained unmoving.
Flavius bit his lip. Then: "How may I serve Your Majesty?"
"You can tell me what you know of Phryne's vanishing," spat Mithradates.
"What?" Flavius took a step backward. His eyes flickered to Eodan, then returned—and suddenly a faint smile quivered upon his mouth.
"I know nothing, Lord," he murmured. "Yet I would venture that she fled in the night?"
"It is so told," Mithradates answered. "Is this any work of yours?"
"Of course not, Great King! I suggest—"
"Hesaysit was not caused by him," snapped Eodan. "Yet My Master knows he was never a friend to me or mine. Nor is Rome itself a friend of Pontus. What better way to harm us all at one blow?"
Flavius looked at Mithradates, who rumbled like a beast in the arena. Then, slowly, the Roman's ruddy-brown eyes sought Eodan's, held them and would not let go. "This was your plan to strike at me, was it not?" he murmured.
"I know nothing of it!" shouted Eodan. "I only know—"
Flavius shook his head, smiling. "Cimbrian, Cimbrian, you have laid down your natural weapons and tried a womanish trick. You will gain no victory with it. There is never any luck in demeaning oneself."
Eodan sought for words, but he found only a black mist of his rage and fear. And of his shame—that he should have tried to use Phryne's plight as a dagger in a Roman back. Yes, he thought, shaken, I have called down evil upon myself and now I must somehow endure what comes.
Flavius turned back to Mithradates. He flung out speech as crisp as though to an army: "Great King, you are insulted by so clumsy an attempt at dividing me from your royal favor. Is it not likelier that this man, who knows the girl—we have only his word and hers that she is even a maiden—this man plotted with her to flee? Surely she had more chance to conspire with him and his friend than me; the caravan master who brought us here from Sinope will testify that she shunned me the whole trip, whereas she was in Eodan's tent yesterday afternoon. And would she go out into that desert with no hope of succor? Would she not assure herself of an accomplice, a captain who could ride out from the army whenever and wherever he wished—to bring her food, protection, ultimately to smuggle her back?"
Mithradates hunched his thick frame. His knuckles stood forth white on the knife hilt; he glared with three red eyes at Eodan and hawked out: "What have you to say?"
"That I serve the King and this Roman does not," answered the Cimbrian frantically.
He felt himself driven back by Flavius' marching phrases: "Protector of the East, there is a simple explanation for what has occurred. Rather, there are two. First, the barbarian and the Greekling feared what would happen when you, their master, learned she had lied to you and was only the leavings of a runaway slave. Thus he sent her out and will try to lead her back in the wake of the army; she may live with him, disguised, in Sinope itself; or conceivably he lured her forth with some such promise, murdered and buried her. Second, it is possible that he himself speaks truth for once, and it was her decision alone to flee. Like unto like—she, a slave born, would rather lie with some Phrygian goatherd than with the King!"
Mithradates bellowed, as though he had been speared. He seized a lamp, broke its chains with a jerk and hurled it into the fire-pit. When his working face came under Eodan's eyes, the Cimbrian knew where he had seen such a look before—in small children, about to scream from uncontrollable rage.
"She will follow that lamp into the flames," said the Pontine. It was almost a groan.
"The Roman lies!" Eodan stalked toward Flavius, raising his hands. The worn eagle face waited for him with a smile of mastery. "I will tear out his throat!"
Remembering himself, he turned about and cried: "We do not know it was not witchcraft, Lord."
Mithradates swallowed hard. He beat a fist into his palm, walked back and forth under the twisted Celtic gods and, inch by inch, drew a cover across his wrath. Finally his giant striding halted. He searched Eodan's countenance somberly and asked, "Will you swear, by all which is holy to you, you have never known her body, and this is no work of yours?"
"I swear it, My King," said Eodan.
"A barbarian's word," jeered Flavius.
"Be still!" crashed the voice of Mithradates. "I know this man."
Then for a while longer he brooded. "Or does any man know another, or even himself?" he asked the wooden gods.
Decision hardened over the moltenness in him. "Well," he said heavily, "it seems that she went because of something in her own will, or an enchantment. In neither case is she a fit vessel for royal seed. Let the Axylon have her."
Eodan's muscles began to ease. He thought, in a remote part of himself: Flavius turned my own foolishness against me, but perhaps Phryne left her good genius here to watch. For now it has all become as she must have wished—herself riding off unpursued and no disfavor caused Tjorr or me.
"She is only another female, after all," said Mithradates. "I could send men to fetch her back and let her die an example, but it is unworthy of a civilized man."
"She would doubtless kill herself when your riders came in view, Your Majesty," said Flavius. "Unless, of course, the barbarian here were sent after her—"
"Would you truly split him from me?" croaked Mithradates. Sweat studded his face; Eodan knew suddenly what a combat the king was waging in himself. "Go, both of you!"
"At once, Your Majesty," said Flavius. "The Lord of the East is wise, knowing that if she fled in rebelliousness she will be most amply punished. A herdsman who spied her from afar would know how to stalk her and pounce unsuspected." He bowed a little toward Eodan. "If the King permits one more word from me, I should like to withdraw my hints as to treason by the barbarian. It is clear that he has abandoned the girl to the Axylon. So if ever he did conspire with her, he is now aware of his rightful duty toward his true benefactor."
The fires burned higher in the king's eyes. His tone cracked the barest trifle: "So. Let neither Cimbrian nor Alan leave the army, even for minutes, until we come home." His lips writhed upward. "It is not that I doubt your oath, Eodan—" But you do, mourned a thought through the Cimbrian's upsurging wrath, you do! Flavius knows well how to sow dragon's teeth—"merely to silence tongues."
Eodan saw Flavius waver; the hall and its grinning gods became unreal. He threw back his head to howl.
And then everything drained from him. He stood empty of anger, or hate, or even sorrow. There was only a road, with night at its end, and the knowledge that he must walk it or cease to be himself.
"Lord," he said, "let your servant depart."
Mithradates started. "What do you mean?"
"I was honored to serve the Great King, but it cannot be any more. Let me go out upon the Axylon."
Flavius caught a gasp between his teeth. Mithradates drew his knife in a hand that shook. The slaves at the room's end cowered back into shadow; some half-sensed ripple went along the lines of guardsmen, and all their eyes swung inward toward Eodan.
"I must thank the Roman," he went on. "I would have let her die out there, or worse than die. He showed me my shame. I am not certain why she is gone: it may be a spell cast on her or it may be of her own choosing, for some reason I do not understand. But she watched over me while I slept among foemen. I cannot offer her less now than my own help."
"You—would bring her back—here?" Mithradates said it with a stubbornness that dug in its heels. He would not believe anything else. "Well, perhaps so—"
"With the Alan kept hostage for his return, Your Majesty," put in Flavius.
Eodan shook his head. "Tjorr has nothing to do with this, My Lord. That is why I ask leave to depart the King's service. I do not think it likely Phryne wishes to return hither."
"And you would set her will above mine?" asked Mithradates in a stunned voice.
"What I would like," said Eodan, "is that you give her freely into my hands, so that I could bring her back here and let her do or not do whatever she wished. But I have no art of wheedling; I ask merely for a dismissal."
"You will get your head on a gatepost!" exclaimed Flavius in a blaze of victory.
Mithradates stood stooped, his breath rattling in his lungs. His head swung back and forth, as though he were a bull looking for a man to gore.
Suddenly he leaped forward, and his knife flashed. Eodan stepped aside. The knife struck a pillar, drove in and snapped off short. "Guards!" bellowed the king. "Seize this traitor!"
Eodan stood quietly. Hands fell upon him, spears touched his ribs. He glanced at Flavius. The Roman laughed aloud, bent close while Mithradates screamed and shredded his cloak, and whispered, "Did you think, you fool, he would let you go? You have all but said before his household, Phryne left because she would not be taken by him. You insulted more than the king's majesty, you insulted his manhood!"
"I knew what I said," Eodan answered.
Mithradates raged up, flung Flavius and a guardsman aside, and smote the Cimbrian's face with his hand.
Eodan shook a ringing head, licked the blood that ran from his mouth and said in Greek, "I did not know it was the custom of civilized men to strike a guest."
Mithradates fell back as though from a sword thrust.
Then for a while he paced, snarling and mewing. Flavius began to talk, but a lion roar silenced him. "Wine!" said the King at last. A slave hurried up with a flagon. Mithradates snatched it, kicked the kneeling man in the stomach, drained the cup and crumpled its heavy silver between his fingers.
"Another," he commanded.
It was brought him. He drank it with more care. He flung himself onto the high seat, slumped for a while, looked up into the darkness above the rafters and finally began to laugh. It was a raw, barking laugh, with little humor, but at the end he stood up and spoke calmly.
"Release him," he said. The guards fell back, and Eodan waited. Mithradates folded his arms. "After this," he continued, almost in a light tone, "you will not care to stay. It is a delicate question whether you are my guest, my soldier or my slave, but civilized people must be generous. Let the Cimbrian take the horse, the arms and the monies he got from me. Let him ride off wherever he wishes, so he come not back to this army." The wind piped around the hall; the fire-pits roared. "Well, begone!" cried Mithradates.
Eodan bent his knee and backed out, as though he were leaving on some royal errand. And would the Powers it were so, he thought dully, knowing a wound took hours to feel pain.
He heard Flavius say, in a voice that quivered: "Great King, will you also let this guest depart?"
As if from immensely far away, the voice of Mithradates came: "There is a destiny here. I would stand in its way if I dared—but I am only a man, even I.... Tomorrow at dawn, when we march north, you may quit the camp." An animal scream: "Now leave my eyes! All of you! Every man in here, leave the King to himself!"
They streamed out, almost running, terror written beneath the bright helmets; for the king sat at a heathen god's feet and wept.
Eodan saw Flavius stalk toward his own tent. They exchanged no words. He went to his place, clapped for a groom and donned his Persian war-garb. A saddled gray stallion was led forth. Eodan sprang upon it and trotted quickly from camp.
He would follow the highway south, hoping for a sign.
An hour afterward, when the Pontine army was only smoke on a gray horizon, he saw the dust cloud behind. It neared, until he could see the black horse that raised it, and finally he heard the drumbeat of its hoofs—and Tjorr's red beard flaunted itself in the wind.
"Whoof!" said the Alan, pulling up alongside him. "You might have waited."
Eodan cried aloud, "It was not needful. You should have stayed where your luck was."
"No—now, what luck would come to a man that forsook his oaths?" said Tjorr. "I was weary of Pontus anyhow. Now we will surely drink of my Don again."
"Since gossip brought you the tale so swiftly," Eodan said, "you must also have heard the Romans will be after us at dawn tomorrow. They have money, and the Gauls here favor them; they'll hire guides, dogs and a string of remounts."
"I have hunted and been hunted on plains before now," replied Tjorr. "A flock of sheep to confuse the scent, a trackless waste as soon as we leave this road—Oh, we can race them all the way to Parthia with good hope of winning."
"But that is what we may not do, and why you had best return before the King learns of your absence. I left only on Phryne's account. I shall have to find her before undertaking such a trip, and it may consume all the time between me and the pursuit."
Tjorr cocked an eye at him knowingly. Eodan felt his wind-beaten face grow hot. He said angrily, "She is my oath-sister. Did she think I would forget what that means?"
"Da," nodded the Alan, "or she would have given herself to Mithradates with no fuss." He squinted down the rutted dirt road, which wound among boulders and sere grass until it lost itself in stormy black clouds. "Now our task is to trail her, and she would have made herself hard to trail. We can only follow this, I think, till we come on someone who's seen a boyish-looking horse archer go by ... for thus I take it she equipped herself."
"So my groom told me, and he was too frightened to make up a lie. Come, then!"
They jingled through unspeaking hours.
At day's end they passed a goatherd in a stinking wool tunic and knitted Phrygian cap. He gave them a sullen look and mumbled his own language, which they did not understand, through greasy whiskers. Eodan felt grimness. Bad enough to be entering wilds where few if any could speak with him; but this was also a land where the half-Persian warriors had made themselves hated. He thought, as darkly and coldly as the whistling twilight, that Flavius might well overhaul him tomorrow before he had any word of Phryne. He might be wholly doomed; the gods feared proud men.
Well, if such was his destiny, he would give no god the pleasure of seeing him writhe under it.
"Ho-ah!" cried Tjorr.
Eodan looked up from his thoughts. The Alan pointed westward, where a single dirty-red streak beneath steel and smoke colors marked sunset. "A horse out there," he said. Eodan spied the beast; it was trotting wearily north over the plain.
Horror stood up in him and screamed. He clamped back an answer of his own, struck spurs into his mount and left the highway. The wind snapped his cloak and tried to pull him from his seat. Once his horse stumbled on a rock, unseen in the gloom, but he kept the saddle, swaying lightly to help the animal muscles that flowed between his knees. And so he drew up to the other horse.
It was a chestnut gelding with silvered harness; a light ax was sheathed at the saddlebow—thus did the riders of Pontus equip themselves. The beast shivered in the heartless wind; its tail streamed, but the mane was sweat-plastered to a sunken neck. Worn out, it groped a way back toward the king.
Eodan felt as if the heart had been cut from him, leaving only a hollowness that bled. "Hers," he said.
"None else," said Tjorr. "A lone alien, with arms and armor worth ten years of a shepherd's work ... a sling ... and the steed bolted—" He looked down upon his useless hands. "I am sorry, my sister."
Eodan let her horse go. He began to follow the way it had come, as nearly as he could judge. He would not leave Phryne's bones to whiten on this plain. Surely the gods cared for her, if not for him. They would lead him to her and grant him the time to make a pyre and a cairn and to howl over her.
Dusk thickened. After some part of an hour, he heard a furtive scuttering in the grass. He rode after it, and a naked man squeaked forlornly and dodged from him. It was a Phrygian, wholly bare; he had not even a staff, but he clutched something to his breast as he ran. Eodan drew rein and watched him go.
"What happened to him?" asked Tjorr, clasping his hammer; for this was an uncanny thing to meet on a treeless autumnal plain at nightfall.
"I do not know," said Eodan. "Robbers—the same who killed Phryne?—or some trolldom, perhaps, for we are in no good country. We cannot speak with that man, so best we leave him alone to his weird."
They trotted on. But it grew too dark to see, and Eodan would not risk passing by his oath-sister. In the morning the kites would show him from afar where she lay. Then the Romans would come, and he would stand by her grave and fight till they slew him.
"I would like a fire," said Tjorr. He fumbled in the murk, caring for his horse. "The night-gangers would stay away."
"They will anyhow," Eodan told him. "It is not fated that we should be devoured by witch-beasts."
Tjorr said, with awe heavy in his tones: "I will believe that. You are something more than a man tonight."
"I am a man with a goal," said Eodan. "Nothing else."
"That is enough," said Tjorr. "It is more than I could bear to be. I dare not touch you before dawn."
Eodan rolled himself into the saddle blanket, put his head on his wadded cloak and lay in cold, streaming darkness. The earth felt sick, yearning for rain, and the rain was withheld. He wondered if some of the lightning Tjorr called on had indeed been locked up in the hammer. When they died tomorrow, the rain might come; or perhaps, thought Eodan, the first snow, for he is the rain but I am the winter.
I am the wind.
He lay listening to himself blow across the earth, in darkness, in darkness, with the unrestful slain Cimbri rushing through the sky behind him. He searched all these evil plains for Phryne; the whole night became his search for Phryne's ghost. There were many skulls strewn in the long dead grasses, for this land was very old. But none of them was hers, and none of them could tell him anything of her; they only gave him back his own empty whistling. He searched further, up over the Caucasus glaciers and then down to a sea that roared under his lash, until finally he came riding past a bloody-breasted hound, through sounding caves to the gates of hell; hoofs rang hollow as he circled hell, calling Phryne's name, but there was no answer. Though he shook his spear beneath black walls, no one stirred, no one spoke, even the echoes died. So he knew that hell was dead, it had long ago been deserted; and he rode back to the upper world feeling loneliness horrible within him. And centuries had passed while he was gone. It was spring again. He rode by the grave mound of a warrior named Eodan, which stood out on the edge of the world where the wind was forever blowing; and on the sheltered side he saw a little coltsfoot bloom, the first flower of spring.
Then he rested with gladness. The earth turned beneath him; he heard its cold creaking among a blaze of stars. Winter came again, and summer, and winter once more, unendingly. But he had seen a coltsfoot growing....
"There is light enough now."
Eodan opened his eyes. The gale had slackened, he saw. The air felt a little warmer, and the wind had a wet smell to it. Southward, the world was altogether murk. It must be snowing there, he thought dreamily. The wind would bring the snow here before evening. Strange that the first snow this year should come from the south. But then, perhaps the land climbed more slowly than the eye could see ... yes, surely it did, for he had heard that the Taurus Mountains lay in that direction.
"The Mountains of the Bull," he said. "It may be an omen."
"What do you mean?" Tjorr was a blocky shadow in the wan half-light, squatting with a loaf of bread in his hands.
"We must cross the Mountains of the Bull to reach Parthia."
"If we live that long," grunted the Alan. He ripped off a chunk of bread, touched it with his hammer and threw it out into the dark. Perhaps some god or sprite or whatever lived here would accept the sacrifice.
"That is uncertain," agreed Eodan. He shivered and rolled out of his blanket. "Best we be on our way. The enemy will start at sunrise."
Tjorr regarded him carefully. "You are a man again," he said. "A mortal, I mean. You are no more beyond hope, and thus not beyond the fear of losing that hope. What happened?"
"Phryne lives," said Eodan.
Tjorr reached for a leather wine bottle and poured out a sizable libation. "I would name the god this is for, if you will tell me who sent you that vision," he said.
"I do not know," said Eodan. "It might have been only myself. But I thought of Phryne, who is wise and has too much life in her to yield it up needlessly. She would have known that one Pontine soldier, on a single jaded horse, would invite a race between robbers and Romans. But who heeds a wandering Phrygian, some workless shepherd?" He laughed aloud, softly. "Do you understand? She stopped that man we saw—at arrow point, I would guess—and made him lay down all his garments. She could make her wish clear by gestures. Doubtless she flung him a coin; I remember how he held something near his heart. When he had fled, she rode on until her horse was too tired to be of use. Then she buried her archer's outfit, taking merely the bow and a knife, I suppose, and went on afoot."
Tjorr whooped. "Do you think so? Aye, aye—it must be! Well, let's saddle our nags and catch her!" He ran after his own hobbled animal. When he had brought it back, he looked at Eodan for a moment in a very curious way.
"I am not so sure the witch-power I felt last night has left you,disa," he murmured. "Or that it ever will."
"I have no arts of the mage," snapped Eodan. "I only think."
"I have a feeling that to think is a witchcraft mightier than all others. Will you remember old Tjorr when they begin to sacrifice to you?"
"You prattle like a baby. To horse!"
They moved briskly through the quickening light, Eodan ripping wolfishly at a sausage as he rode. Now Flavius was going forth to hunt. The Cimbrian would need strength this day.
The brown grass whispered; here and there a leafless bush clawed in an agony of wind. Mile after mile the sun, hidden by low-flying gray, touched the Axylon, until finally Eodan and Tjorr rode in the full great circle of the horizon. A hunter could see far in this land.
They spied a sheep flock, larger than most, but spent no time on its watchers. Phryne would be able to see at a distance, too; the need was to come within eye-range of her. Close beyond, Eodan discerned what must be the home of the owner or tenant or whoever dwelt here. It was better than usual, being not of mud, but was still only a small stone house—windowless, surely with just one room, blowing smoke from a flat sod roof. There were a couple of rude little outbuildings, also of moss-chinked boulders, and some haystacks. Nothing else broke the emptiness, and nothing moved but a half-savage dog. The women and children must be huddled terrified behind their door as the gleaming mail-coats rode by. Eodan felt a sudden hurt; it was so strange to him he had to think a while before he recognized it—yes, pity. How many human lives, throughout the boundless earth and time, were merely such a squalid desolation?
A king, he thought, was rightfully more than power. He should be law. Yes, and a bringer of all goodly arts; a just man, who tamed wild folk more with his law than his spear—though he was also the one who taught them how to make war when war was needed—so far as the jealous gods allowed, a king should be freedom.
And afterward, he thought wryly, when the king was dead, the people would bring back all the reeking past in his now holy name. But no, not quite all of it. Doubtless men slid back two steps for every three they made; nevertheless, that third step endured, and it was the king's.
Phryne could show me how, he thought.
As if in answer, he saw the little figure rise from the bush where it had lain concealed. Dwarfed by hundreds of yards, she came running in her Phrygian goatskin and rags; but Eodan's gray horse hammered those yards away, and he leaped from the saddle and caught her to him.
She held him close, weeping on his cold steel coat. "It was not what I wanted, that you should come. It was not what I wanted."
"It was what I wanted," he said. He raised her chin until he could smile down into her violet eyes. "I will hear no reproaches. Enough that I found you."
"I shall never run from you again," she said. "Where you make your home, there shall Hellas be."
Hoofs clumped at their backs. Tjorr coughed. "Uh-hm! The enemy is on his way, with hounds and remounts. And we've only two beasts. Best we flee while we can."
Eodan straightened. "No," he said. "I, too, have run far enough."
They rode up to the shepherd's house. Phryne struck the dog on the nose with her staff when it flew at her throat. It ran away, and she strung her bow and nocked an arrow. Eodan stayed mounted, the German sword in his hand. Tjorr went afoot to the door and beat on it with his hammer.
"Open!" he bawled. Nothing stirred. He hefted the maul, swung it high and sent it crashing against the latch. The flimsy bolt cracked in two. Voices piped with fear in the dark hut. A shaking graybeard barred the entrance, holding a rusty old ax. Tjorr grabbed him by the tunic and threw him to the ground, not unkindly. "Out!" he said, gesturing.
They shambled forth. There was only one woman, shapeless in a sacklike gown, and a dozen children. They looked so unlike that Eodan decided fatherhood was divided among the three herdsmen who had left their flock and were hovering timidly half a mile away.
"Must we turn bandit?" asked Phryne in a troubled voice.
Eodan considered her, clad in the same foul garments as the shepherds, but shining through it. He said bluntly, "This is no otherwise than smiting that whelp they kept." But because of her look he remembered certain thoughts about a king and fumbled in his purse. He tossed some coins to the ground. The grandsire sucked in his breath and crawled to shaky feet; the three men edged closer.
"Does anyone here speak Greek?" called Eodan. They stared. "Well, you shall understand my signs then, with a kick if your minds lag, for our time is short. I will give you ten times the worth of these hovels." He turned to Phryne. "Do you watch over Tjorr and me. Let them not talk much among themselves. Shoot the first who shows treachery. And now let us work!"
Dismounting, he peered into the house. Enough light came through the door and smokehole to show him a littered earth floor, piled sheepskins, a few stone tools and clay vessels, a dung fire. But the ceiling was what he looked at. Branches hauled from some remote forest many years ago were laid across the walls, and turf piled on them to make a roof. He nodded. "Thus I thought," he said.
Tjorr rounded up the family and made them watch him. A child whimpered as he climbed the rough wall to the roof and began throwing off its sod layers. He flung the child a coin. At once the oldest boy grinned brashly, swarmed up and helped. Tjorr laughed, clambered down and went to the shed. Using Phryne's staff for a lever, he pried a few rocks out of its wall. The same child studied his face carefully and tried another whimper. Tjorr gave it another coin. The mother giggled. Tjorr urged her to the task.
Then for some hours he and Eodan made the shepherd folk demolish their roof and their outbuildings. Phryne paced the dusty grounds, watchfully, her bow always in her hand. The wind blew from the high country and the snow clouds moved closer.
There were stout wooden posts at the corners of the shed. Tjorr dug them out and dragged them to the roofless house. He set two of them upright on the floor—one close to the entrance and one a yard from the rear wall; across them he laid a third. Then he put the branch-rafters back, crossing his heavy timber piece, and heaped a layer of turf on as before. The shepherd people gaped, blinked, made signs against the evil eye, which these surely crazed men must have, but helped him after a few blows. He had them form a line and pass him stones from the wrecked outbuildings. These he laid on the turf, within a yard of the rear wall, layer upon layer. Finally the branches beneath sagged, and even the timber upbearing them started to groan. Quickly, then, he threw enough sod on his roof of boulders to hide what it was.
Meanwhile Eodan was digging inside the house, at its rear end. He sank a pit nearly eight feet deep and drove a shaft from that, several yards outward, so that it ended below the grounds; he left the wooden shovel there and came back out. Rather his crew of men and children did this, even as most of the roof work had Tjorr merely overseeing. They would need their whole strength later.
At the end, hours past the time they began, Phryne looked at the completed task. She saw merely a shepherd hut with a somewhat thicker roof than was common, and wreckage behind it. "Do our lives hang on no more than this?" she asked wonderingly. "Would it not have been better to flee across the plain?"
"Once they found our trail," said Tjorr grimly, "they could have changed horse and horse while our own ran themselves dead. No, our chances here are not good, but I think thedisa'splan has made them better for us than if we played mouse to the Roman ferret"
"One more thing to do," said Eodan. He kindled a stick, went over and touched it to the haystacks. The shepherds moaned. Eodan grinned, with a certain pity, and tossed the grandsire his full purse. "There's the price of your flocks and home and a winter's lodging. Go!" He waved his sword and pointed south. They stumbled from him, out onto the plain, looking back with frightened animal eyes. "Why those bonfires?" asked Tjorr. "Not that I don't like the warmth on this bitter day, but—"
"Hay could be stacked around the house and lit," said Eodan. "I do not wish to die in an oven."
Tjorr tugged his ruddy beard. "I had not thought of that. Is it a heavy burden to be forever thinking,disa?"
Eodan did not hear him. He took Phryne's hand in his. "Have I any hope of making you depart until the fight is over?" he asked.
Her dark head shook. "In all else will I obey you," she said, "but I have a right to stand with my man."
"I made you a promise once," he began, shaken.
"Oh, I hold you to it," she laughed. It was a very small and lonely laugh, torn by the wind. "You shall not kiss me against my will. But, Eodan, it is now my will."
He touched his lips to hers, with an unhurried tenderness; if they lived, there would be more than this. Tjorr said: "I make out a dust cloud to the north,disa. I think horsemen."
"Then let us go within," said Eodan.
It was dark in the hut; stones covered the smokehole, now, and the sagging door was closed behind them. They sat on the earth and waited, Phryne lying in the circle of Eodan's arm. Presently hoofs rang on the ground outside, and weapons clashed. They heard a dog bark.
"The place seems deserted," said a voice in Latin. "Maybe the fire in that hay drove its people off."
"And they left two hobbled war-horses?" snapped Flavius. "Look in and see if anyone lairs."
Tjorr planted himself by the doorway, raising his hammer. The door creaked open. Chill gray light outlined a Roman helmet and shimmered off a Roman cuirass. Tjorr struck down, and the helmet gonged. There was the noise of crunching bones. The man fell and did not move again.
"Here we are, Flavius!" cried the Alan.
Phryne loosed an arrow out the door. Someone cursed. Eodan, glimpsing horses and men, sprang to the entrance and peered out. Ten living Romans and a couple of Gauls in battle harness—a dozen men, then, against two men and a woman.... "I reckon, Eodan," said Tjorr, "you and I must each strike six blows."
Flavius rode into the Cimbrian's view. His ravaged face stiffened beneath the plumed helmet. He spoke almost wearily: "I still offer pardon, even liberty and reward, to your companions. It is only you I want, and only because you murdered Hwicca."
"I would most gladly meet you in single combat," said Eodan.
"We have been over this ground before," said Flavius. "Let me ask you instead—do you really wish the Sarmatian and the Greek girl to die on your account? Would it not be most honorable of you to release them from whatever vows they gave you—even command them to depart?"
"He is our king," said Phryne from the darkness. "There are some commands that no king may give."
Flavius sighed. "As you will, then. Decurion, seize them!"
It was a narrow doorway; only one person at a time could go through. The Roman decurion advanced with an infantryman's long shield to guard him. Eodan waited. The decurion charged in, behind him a pikeman. Eodan smote at the first Roman's knees as the pike thrust for his face. Tjorr's hammer struck from the right, knocked the pike aside and snapped its shaft against the doorway. The decurion stopped Eodan's sword-blow, and his own blade darted out. It hit the Persian mail-coat. Eodan chopped at the arm behind it. He lacked room for a real swing, but his edge hit. The decurion went to one knee. Eodan struck at his neck—a hiss and a butcher sound in the air.
Another man followed the decurion, stepped up on the dying officer's back and thrust mightily. Eodan slipped aside. Overbalanced, the Roman stumbled and fell into the hut. Tjorr's hammer crashed on his helmet. One of the Gauls sprang yelling through the undefended entrance. Phryne fired an arrow, and the Gaul staggered; it had caught him in the arm. Eodan attacked him from the side, and the German sword went home in his leg. He fell down, screaming. Tjorr finished him off while Eodan went back to the doorway.
"Nine men left," he panted.
The Romans stood away from him, where he stood dripping Roman blood. No one moved for a while, although Flavius dismounted and paced. The other Gaul came into view. Eodan remembered now that he had heard thumpings overhead. "This roof is made of stones, Master," said the Gaul to Flavius. "We can tear it down, I suppose, but not easily. It would cost us men."
"Likewise to break through the walls," said the Roman. He spoke impersonally, as though this were no more than a school problem. Eodan wondered how much was left the man of joy and hope and even hate; the demons pacing Flavius had bitten him hollow.
"Arrows," he said at last.
Eodan watched them make ready. Four soldiers were shield to shield, a few yards away. If he made a dash, they would be on him, and even a Cimbrian could not hold off four good men in the open. Three more strung their bows and put arrows point down in the ground before them—slowly, carefully, grinning into Eodan's emotionless face. Flavius and the Gaul dragged a post from a torn-down shed into view.
When everything was ready, Flavius stepped forth. "Do you see what I plan?" he called. "You can stand where you are and be filled with arrows, or you can close that door, which is only leather hinges, and wait for us to break it down."
"I think we will wait," said Eodan.
He shut the door, and darkness clamped upon his eyes. He heard the Roman arrows smite and wondered what impulse of fury made Flavius order them fired. He trod on a dead man's hand and wondered what woman and child and horse would wait till time's end for its caress.
"Back," he said. "Into the pit, Phryne."
She kissed him, a stolen instant among shadows, and was gone.
Feet thudded outside. The door, which he had not barred, flew open. Two black blots staggered through, the timber in their arms.
Tjorr met them as they reeled. His hammer boomed on iron. "Ho-ah!" he cried so it rang. "Yuk-hai-saa-saa!Come in and be slain!"
He stood in the middle of the room with Eodan. Each had a Roman shield and his chosen weapon, maul or longsword. They waited.
Dimly seen, a man pushed close to Eodan. His sword cut low, feeling for the Cimbrian's legs. Eodan sprang back. His huge German blade whirled up so it touched the low ceiling. Down it came again, and the shield edge crumpled under it. Eodan raised his weapon once more, struck home and felt blood spurt over his hand.
Another shape, another thrust. He caught that one on his own shield, and the metal glided aside. The Roman shield pushed against the Cimbrian's right arm, giving no room to use a sword. His hobnailed boot trampled down on Eodan's foot, and pain jagged in its path. Eodan drove the boss of his shield into the Roman's face and he heard a splintering. The Roman sank to the floor, dazed.
There were two more, now, in the belling, clanging gloom. They came in on either side, to catch him between them. He kicked out to the right, and his spur flayed open a thigh. As the shield dropped a little in the man's anguish, Eodan smote. He struck a helmet, but the sheer force of it snapped the Roman's head down. The man went to his hands and knees and crawled away.
Eodan had been holding the other off left-handed, keeping his shield as a barrier. Now, whipping about, he slid the rim aside and then back again, so that he locked shields with his enemy and held him fast. He reached over the top with his longsword and drove the point home.
"Ho-yo-yo!" chanted Tjorr, battering till it thundered. Eodan might have let out a Cimbrian howl, but he had no more wish for it. "Back!" he gasped to the Alan. "Back before they hem us in!"
Eyes were now used to the shifting twilight, the pale gray dazzle of the doorway. Eodan and Tjorr stood side by side, just in front of the rear support timber they had erected. Blood ran from their arms and painted their breasts; blood stained the sweat on them, and it was not all Roman this time. But men lay stricken before them; Eodan did not count how many. He looked across three slippery red yards of trampled earth and saw five men still on their feet. None were unwounded.
But weariness shuddered in him. His sword, nicked and blunted, had not bitten well; it was an iron bar in his hand, heavy as sorrow. He could barely hear the deep hoarse breathing of Tjorr, his own heartbeat and thirsty-throated breath were so loud.
Now that all the hunters were inside his den, it was time to destroy them.
Flavius crouched by the door. "Form a line!" he rapped. "Wall to wall! Drive them back and cut them down!"
Four Roman shields filled that narrow room, Flavius standing behind. Eodan raised his weapon and called, "Will you not try the edge of this even once, murderer?"
Flavius screamed. For one blink of time, over the advancing shields and helmets, through the wintry gloom, Eodan looked upon madness. It came to him that he should not have taunted an unbearable grief. The gods are too just.
Flavius raised his sword and flung it above the soldiers.
Eodan felt it strike him in the head. He staggered back, suddenly blinded with his own blood. The pain seared through his skull until he stood in a world that was all great whirling flame. He thought as he toppled, This also must a king have known, what it is to be slain.
The Romans cried their victory and moved in on Tjorr. The Alan threw down his shield, picked Eodan up with one arm, and swung his hammer. Even as it hit the pillar he had raised, he leaped into the pit and the tunnel beyond.
The timber slipped sideways. The piece it had helped carry, running lengthwise, fell. The thin branches cracked, and the roof of stones came down.
Eodan heard it dimly, from far away. Now the sky has been shattered, he thought, and gods and demons die in the wreck of their war. A star whirled by me and hissed into the sea.
He lay in the tunnel, as though in a womb, while the stones buried his hunters. There followed a silence that tolled. He heard Tjorr and Phryne calling to each other in utter night. Her hands groped for him. He lay in her hands and let the pain reach full tide.
It ebbed again. Tjorr dug a few feet upward. Breaking out into the open, he reached down, hauled forth Eodan and Phryne and whistled at what he saw.
"Best I catch the horses," he said awkwardly. "You can see to him, can you not?"
She kissed her man for answer.
Eodan looked up at the sky. "Lie still," whispered Phryne. "Lie still. It is well. We are safe."
The wind blew softly, almost warm. The first snow fell on his face. "Have I been badly hurt?" he asked.
She told him plainly: "Your left eye is gone. Now I must love the right one twice as much."
"Is it no more than that?" he sighed. "I thought my debt was greater. The Powers are kind."
North of the city Tanais the Don River wound like a shining snake, like the lightning itself in a godlike calm, through rolling plains where horses pastured. In early summer the land blazed blue with cornflowers.
On the west side of the Don, from the Azov Sea as far northward as their might would take them, dwelt the Rukh-Ansa. They were a proud folk—warriors, horse breeders, and weapon makers; their women walked with long fair locks garlanded and dresses of linen wind-blown around their tall bodies; their chiefs rewarded a bard's song with golden rings.
Nonetheless, these were ill times, and, when Tjorr the Red came home, folk sacrificed bullocks in the hope that he carried better luck. From wide about the chiefs came riding, until Beli's hall rang with their iron and the ale flowed merrily. They guested Beli not only to hear what his returned son could tell them of far farings, but because there had been tales of a king whom Tjorr had brought with him. Sorely did the Rukh-Ansa need a wise king.
His was a strange band when it rode to the river's east bank and was ferried across with gifts from awed tribesmen. Tjorr himself did not lead it, though the redbeard shone in Parthian mail and glittered with Grecian silver. He was captain of the warriors, several score Alanic horsemen guarding a rich baggage train; his own wagon was full of gold, armor and three lovely concubines. When he related how all this had come to him through the luck in his hammer, many folk went on their faces; surely that hammer held lightning.
And yet Tjorr acknowledged another man hisdisa—a very tall man with long wheat-colored hair, a lean withdrawn face, the sun written on his brow, and one green eye. This Eodan did not dress much like a king; his mail was serviceable but unadorned; he claimed no trolldom or god-power in his weapons. Moreover, he had only one wife—a slight girl with dark hair and violet eyes who rode like a man but nursed a son in her arms and had one a year older in a carrying-cradle at her saddlebow. Eodan would not even accept the overnight loan of another woman; he smiled in his distant way, thanked his host and then returned to his Phryne.
So the Rukh-Ansa wondered at Tjorr ... wondered even if the Phryne girl were not a witch who had ensnared both him and her husband ... and then they would come to speak with Eodan, and after a while they would understand why Tjorr called him King.
Fires burned high in Beli's feasting hall. The chiefs of the Rukh-Ansa clans sat at table and raised ox horns heavy with silver and beer, to the honor of Tjorr and Tjorr's lord.
Gray Beli blinked dim eyes at his son. "Will you not tell us the whole tale of your wanderings?" he asked.
"Not in one day," said Tjorr. "There are many winter evenings' worth of telling. Let it only be said now that I was sold through Greece and Italy until I ended in a Roman galley. But then Eodan and Phryne freed me. We seized the ship and sailed eastward, until we found the court of King Mithradates."
"The same whose general hurled us back three summers ago from the Chersonese?" asked Beli.
Tjorr nodded. "Aye. I wish I had fought with you, but at that very time, as the gods willed it, I was fighting on Mithradates' behalf, down in Galatia. He was a good master to us. Why did you war on his realm?"
Beli shrugged. "It was a hungry year. We have had many hungry years of late; there are too many of us. But the raid failed, and now the Chersonese is barred to our horses."
"I will have somewhat to counsel you about that," said Eodan. He had already learned the Alanic tongue, as it was said he knew several others, besides reading and writing. Yes, a man of deep mind, with witch-powers he would not show to just anyone—yes, yes.
"Where then did you go?" asked Beli.
"We fell out with Mithradates," said Tjorr, "and for a while we were two men and a woman, alone on a cold plain. But we had killed some Romans, who had fat purses. So we bought huts and sheep from the Phrygians, to live that winter. In spring we continued through Lycaonia; it is too friendly with Rome these days, so we did not stay, simply bribed our way past. There are tribes in the Mountains of the Bull, hunters and warriors, who made us welcome. We aided them and lived there a year since my king's first son had to be born. Next spring we came to Parthia with a following of young men and offered the lord there our services, he being Rome's foe. There we had it well since the favor of nobles came to us, once they saw what a man they had in my king. We dwelt in a fine city and had only enough warlike missions on the border to keep us amused. Yet we longed to be among our own sort of men again. So this spring we got leave to go, and came up through Armenia and behind the Caucasus until we found Alans—and thus your home, My Father."
"Much have you seen," said Beli. The war-chiefs of the Rukh-Ansa clashed their ale horns under his words.
"I have seen less with two eyes than my King has with one," said Tjorr humbly. "He has learned the arts of many nations. He would teach his own people whatever of it they can use."
"Where are your folk?" asked Beli of the stranger.
"North," said Eodan. "They were the Cimbri once. Now they are any who dwell where heather blooms and beech forests blow."
"We will go north, my king and I, to rule in his land," said Tjorr. "There are not many dwelling in it. No few of the Rukh-Ansa could follow us, find new homes in the North and become great."
"Some of the younger ones might," agreed Beli.
"Might?" cried Tjorr. "Why, if I know my clans, they will be at spearheads over the right to come!"
"Not all," said Beli. "Not even most. For if you fare north you will become something else than what you are."
"That is true," said Eodan. "Yet what is it to live, than to become something else?"
"Forgive me," said Beli, "but there are men who would not follow a one-eyed king."
"Let them stay home, then," snorted Tjorr. "I'll pasture my horses on the edge of the world if he leads me there."
"Yes," nodded Beli. "Yes. There are such kings. But how did it happen you lost your eye, Lord?"
Eodan smiled. It was a wry smile, not ungentle, but wholly without youth. He had known too much ever to be young again. He said, "I gave it for wisdom."
It was told from olden days, and written in the books of Snorri Sturlason, that the Asa or Ansa folk came from the land of Tanais to the North. They soon became overlords; from the high hall they raised at Upsala their power spread, until even the German tribes drew chieftains and learning from them. For they were good masters, who brought their new people not only wealth but knowledge. They gave to the North crafts of both peace and war, such as the building of longships and the breeding of fine horses, the writing of runes and the mustering of armies, foreign trade and foreign travel, much leechcraft and many wise laws. By all this the folk were strengthened and helped, so that they lifted themselves from rude forest dwellers to mighty nations who finally overthrew the Roman power and peopled Europe afresh, in the time of the Wanderings. Above all did they shape the country called England, and there they kept much of the old freedom-shielding law that the Asa men first brought.
Every king in the North reckoned descent from the Asa lords, who themselves came to be worshiped as gods after they died. The first Asa king was called Odin, and he was the chief of the gods.