Then he admitted to himself that, strangely, he preferred things the way they were now. However, he must have made some unintentional noise as he awaited the question, for he noticed that Horace had sealed his lips firmly and determinedly. Obviously, he had sensed the reaction and had decided that he would not bother Halt with another question. Not yet, anyway.
Which left Halt in a strange quandary. Because now that the question was unasked, he couldn’t help wondering what it would have been. There was a nagging sense of incompletion about the morning all of a sudden. He tried to ignore the feeling but it would not be pushed aside. And for once, Horace seemed to have conquered his almost irresistible need to ask the question that had occurred to him.
Halt waited a minute or two but there was no sound except for the jingling of harness and the creaking of leather from their saddles. Finally, the former Ranger could bear it no longer.
‘What?’
The question seemed to explode out of him, with a greater degree of violence than he had intended. Taken by surprise, Horace’s bay shied in fright and danced several paces sideways.
Horace turned an aggrieved look on his mentor as he calmed the horse and brought it back under control.
‘What?’ he asked Halt and the smaller man made a gesture of exasperation.
‘That’s what I want to know,’ he said irritably. ‘What?’
Horace peered at him. The look was all too obviously the sort of look that you give to someone who seems to have taken leave of his senses. It did little to improve Halt’s rapidly rising temper.
‘What?’ said Horace, now totally puzzled.
‘Don’t keep parroting at me!’ Halt fumed. ‘Stop repeating what I say! I asked you “what”, so don’t ask me “what” back, understand?’
Horace considered the question for a second or two, then, in his deliberate way, he replied: ‘No.’
Halt took a deep breath, his eyebrows contracted into a deep V, and beneath them his eyes sparked with anger. But before he could speak, Horace forestalled him.
‘What “what” are you asking me?’ he said, then, thinking how to make his question clearer, he added, ‘Or to put it another way, why are you asking “what”?’
Controlling himself with enormous restraint, and making no secret of the fact, Halt said, very precisely: ‘You were about to ask a question.’
Horace frowned. ‘I was?’
Halt nodded. ‘You were. I saw you take a breath to ask it.’
‘I see,’ said Horace. ‘And what was it about?’
For just a second or two, Halt was speechless. He opened his mouth, closed it again, then finally found the strength to speak.
‘That is what I was asking you,’ he said. ‘When I said “what”, I was asking you what you were about to ask me.’
‘I wasn’t about to ask you “what?”,’ Horace replied and Halt glared at him suspiciously. It occurred to him that Horace could be indulging himself in a gigantic leg pull, that he was secretly laughing at Halt. This, Halt could have told him, was not what might be called a good career move. Rangers were not people who took kindly to being laughed at. He studied the boy’s open face and guileless blue eyes and decided that his suspicion was ill-founded.
‘Then what, if I may use that word once more, were you about to ask me?’
Horace drew breath once more, then hesitated. ‘I forget,’ he said. ‘What were we talking about?’
‘Never mind,’ Halt muttered, and nudged Abelard into a canter for a few strides to draw ahead of his companion.
He continued to mutter angrily to himself and Horace managed to pick up a few phrases, including ‘addlebrained apprentices who can’t remember what they’re saying from one moment to the next’. From this, he gathered that Halt was less than pleased with the rather confusing conversation they had just had. He frowned again, trying to trace back his thought processes to the point where he had been about to ask the question. He felt he somehow owed it to Halt to remember what it had been; which was odd, as Halt always sighed and rolled his eyes whenever Horace asked a question about anything.
Sometimes, the Ranger could be a confusing companion, he thought. And, as happens so often, the moment he stopped trying to consciously remember the thought that had prompted his question, it popped back into his mind again.
This time, before he could forget it or be distracted from it, he blurted it out.
‘Are there many passes?’ he called to Halt.
The Ranger twisted in his saddle to look back at him. ‘What?’ he asked.
Horace wisely chose to ignore the fact that they were heading for dangerous territory with that word again. He gestured to the mountains frowning down upon them.
‘Through the mountains. Are there many passes into Skandia through the mountains?’
Halt checked Abelard’s stride momentarily, allowing the bay to catch up with them, then resumed his pace.
‘Three or four,’ he said.
‘Then don’t the Skandians guard them?’ Horace asked. It seemed logical to him that they should.
‘Of course they do,’ Halt replied. ‘The mountains form their principal line of defence.’
‘So how did you plan for us to get past them?’
The Ranger hesitated. It was a question that had been taxing his mind since they had taken the road from Chateau Montsombre. If he were by himself, he would have no trouble slipping past unseen. With Horace in company, and riding a big, spirited battlehorse, it might be a more difficult matter. He had a few ideas but was yet to settle on any one of them.
‘I’ll think of something,’ he temporised and Horace nodded wisely, satisfied that Halt would indeed think of something. In Horace’s world, that was what Rangers did best, and the best thing a warrior apprentice could do was let the Ranger get on with thinking, while he took care of walloping anyone who needed to be walloped along the way. He settled back in his saddle, contented with his lot in life.
Halt also felt the nagging doubt lifted. Now he knew what the question was that had died unasked on Horace’s lips.
Then the doubt returned, twice as strong. Perhaps this had been another question and the original one was still unasked? He couldn’t bear not to know.
‘That was what you were going to ask, was it?’
Horace glanced round at him, a little surprised. ‘Wha …?’ he began, then substituted a more acceptable comment. ‘I mean, I beg your pardon?’
Halt shrugged diffidently. ‘The question – about the passes. That was the one you were going to ask before, was it?’ He said it in the tone of one who knew the answer but just wanted to be sure.
‘I think so,’ Horace replied doubtfully. ‘I’m not sure any more … You got me a little confused,’ he finished lamely.
And this time, when Halt rode on ahead, Horace was sure he heard several words that simply didn’t bear repeating.
Erak Starfollower, wolfship captain and one of the senior war jarls of the Skandians, made his way through the low-ceilinged, wood-panelled Lodge to the Great Hall. His face was marked with a frown as he went. He had plenty to do, with the spring raiding season coming on. His ship needed repairs and refitting. Most of all, it needed the fine tuning that only a few days at sea could bring.
Now this summons from Ragnak boded ill for his plans. Particularly since the summons had come through the medium of Borsa, the Oberjarl’s hilfmann, or administrator. If Borsa were involved, it usually meant that Ragnak had some little task for Erak to look after. Or some not so little task, the wolfship skipper thought wryly.
Breakfast was long since finished, so there were only a few servants cleaning up the Hall when he arrived. At the far end, seated at a rough pine table off to one side of Ragnak’s High Seat – a massive pinewood chair that served in place of a throne for the Skandian ruler – Ragnak and Borsa sat, their heads bowed over a pile of parchment scrolls. Erak recognised those scrolls. They were the tax returns for the various towns and shires throughout Skandia. Ragnak
was obsessed with them. As for Borsa, his life was totally dominated by them. He breathed, slept and dreamed the tax returns and woe betide any local jarl who might try to short-change Ragnak, or claim any deduction that wouldn’t pass Borsa’s fine-toothed comb inspection.
Erak put two and two together and sighed quietly. The most likely conclusion that he could draw from the two facts of his summoning and the pile of tax returns on the table was that he was about to be sent off on another tax collecting mission.
Tax collecting was not something that Erak enjoyed. He was a raider and a sea wolf, a pirate and a fighter. As such, his inclination was to be more on the side of the tax evaders than the Oberjarl and his eager-fingered hilfmann. Unfortunately, on those previous occasions when Erak had been sent out to collect overdue or unpaid taxes, he had been too successful for his own good. Now, whenever there was the slightest doubt about the amount of tax owing from a village or a shire, Borsa automatically thought of Erak as the solution to the problem.
To make matters worse, Erak’s attitude and approach to the job only added to his desirability in Borsa’s and Ragnak’s eyes. Bored with the task and considering it embarrassing and belittling, he made sure he spent as little time on the job as possible. Not for him the tortuous arguments and re-calculation of amounts owing after all deductions had been approved and agreed. Erak opted for a more direct course, which consisted of seizing the person under investigation, ramming a double-headed broadaxe up under his chin and threatening mayhem if all taxes, every single one of them, were not paid immediately.
Erak’s reputation as a fighter was well known throughout Skandia. To his annoyance, he was never asked to make good on his threat. Those recalcitrants whom he visited invariably coughed up the due amount, and often a little extra that had never been in contention, without the slightest argument or hesitation.
The two men at the table looked up as he made his way through the benches towards the end of the room. The Great Hall served more than one purpose. It was where Ragnak and his close followers took their meals. It was also the site of all banquets and official gatherings in Skandia’s rough and ready social calendar. And the small, open annex where Ragnak and Borsa were currently studying tax returns was also Ragnak’s office. It wasn’t particularly private, since any member of the inner or outer council of jarls had access to the Hall at any time of day. But then, Ragnak wasn’t the sort to need privacy. He ruled openly and made all his policy statements to the world at large.
‘Ah, Erak, you’re here,’ said Borsa and Erak thought, not for the first time, that the hilfmann had a habit of stating the bleeding obvious.
‘Who is it this time?’ he asked in a resigned tone. He knew there was no use trying to argue his way out of the assignment, so he might as well just get on with it. With luck, it would be one of the small towns down the coast, and at least he might have a chance to work up his crew and wolfship at the same time.
‘Ostkrag,’ the Oberjarl told him, and Erak’s hopes of salvaging something useful from this assignment faded to nothing. Ostkrag lay far inland, to the east. It was a small settlement on the far side of the mountain range that formed the rugged spine of Skandia and was accessible only by going over the mountains themselves or through one of the half dozen tortuous passes that wound their way through.
At best, it meant an uncomfortable journey there and back by pony, a method of transport that Erak loathed. As he thought of the mountain range that reared above Hallasholm, he had a quick memory of the two Araluan slaves he had helped to escape several months ago. He wondered what had become of them, whether they had made it to the small hunting cabin high in the mountains and whether they had survived the last months of winter. He realised abruptly that Borsa and Ragnak were both waiting for his reaction.
‘Ostkrag?’ he repeated. Ragnak nodded impatiently.
‘Their quarterly payment is overdue. I want you to go and shake them up,’ the Oberjarl said. Erak noticed that Ragnak couldn’t quite hide the avaricious gleam that came into his eyes whenever he talked about tax and payments. Erak couldn’t help giving vent to an exasperated sigh.
‘They can’t be overdue by more than a week or so,’ he temporised but Ragnak was not to be swayed and shook his head violently.
‘Ten days!’ he snapped. ‘And it’s not the first time! I’ve warned them before, haven’t I, Borsa?’ he said, turning to the hilfmann, who nodded.
‘The jarl at Ostkrag is Sten Hammerhand,’ Borsa said, as if that were explanation enough. Erak stared blankly at him. ‘He should be called Sten Gluehand,’ he elaborated with heavy sarcasm. ‘The tax payments have stuck to his fingers before this and even when they’re paid in full, he always makes us wait long past the overdue date. It’s time we taught him a lesson.’
Erak smiled with some irony at the small, sparsely muscled hilfmann. Borsa could be an extremely threatening figure, he thought – when someone else was available to carry out the threats.
‘You mean it’s time I taught him a lesson?’ he suggested, but Borsa didn’t notice the sarcasm in his voice.
‘Exactly!’ he said, with some satisfaction. Ragnak, however, was a little more perceptive.
‘It’s my money, after all, Erak,’ he said and there was a note in his voice that was almost petulant. Erak met his gaze steadily. For the first time, he realised that Ragnak was growing old. The once flaming red hair was duller and turning grey. It came as a surprise to Erak. He certainly didn’t feel that he was growing older, yet Ragnak didn’t have too many years on him. He could notice other changes in the Oberjarl now that he had become aware of the fact. The hair was greying, the jowls were heavier and the waistline thickening. He wondered if he was changing too, but then dismissed the notion. He had marked no dramatic changes in his own face and he studied it each morning in his burnished metal mirror. He decided it must be due to the pressures of being Oberjarl.
‘It’s been a severe winter,’ he suggested. ‘Perhaps the passes are still blocked. There was a lot of late snow.’
He moved to the large scale map of Skandia that was displayed on the wall behind Ragnak’s table. He found Ostkrag and, with one forefinger, traced the way to the closest pass.
‘The Serpent Pass,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘It’s not impossible that all that late season snow and the sudden thaw could have led to landslides in there.’ He turned back to Ragnak and Borsa, indicating the position on the map to them.
‘Maybe the couriers simply can’t get through yet?’ he suggested. Ragnak shook his head and again Erak sensed that irritability, the irrational annoyance that seemed to grip Ragnak these days whenever his will was thwarted or his judgement questioned.
‘It’s Sten, I know it,’ he said stubbornly. ‘If it were anyone else, I might agree with you, Erak.’ Erak nodded, knowing full well that the words were a lie. Ragnak rarely agreed with anyone if it meant changing his own position. ‘Get up there and get the money from him. If he argues, arrest him and bring him back. In fact, arrest him even if he doesn’t argue. Take twenty men with you. I want him to see a real show of strength. I’m sick of being taken for a fool by these petty jarls.’
Erak looked up in some surprise. Arresting a jarl in his own lodge was not something to be lightly contemplated – particularly for such a petty offence as a late tax payment. Among the Skandians, tax evasion was considered to be almost obligatory. It was a form of sport. If you were caught out, you paid up and that was the end of it. Erak could not remember anyone being submitted to the shame of arrest on that count. Skandians were a free-spirited people, independent and proud of the fact. And a jarl’s followers held loyalty to their immediate superior to be more important than their allegiance to the Central Lodge where Ragnak held sway.
‘That might not be wise,’ he said quietly and Ragnak glared up at him, his eyes searching for Erak’s over the scattered accounts on the table before him.
‘I’ll decide what’s wise,’ he grated. ‘I’m Oberjarl, not you.’
The words were offensive. Erak was a senior jarl and by long-established custom he was entitled to air his opinion, even though it might be contrary to his leader’s. He bit back the angry retort that sprang to his lips. There was no point provoking Ragnak any further when he was in this mood.
‘I know you’re the Oberjarl, Ragnak,’ he said quietly. ‘But Sten is a jarl in his own right and he may well have a perfectly valid reason for this late payment. To arrest him in those circumstances would be unnecessarily provocative.’
‘I’m telling you he won’t have what you call a “valid reason”, damn it!’ Ragnak’s eyes were narrowed now and his face was suffused with his anger. ‘He’s a thief and a holdout and he needs to be made an example to others!’
‘Ragnak …’ Erak began, trying to reason one last time. This time it was Borsa who interrupted.
‘Jarl Erak, you have your instructions! Now do as you are ordered!’ he shouted and Erak turned angrily to face him.
‘I follow the Oberjarl’s orders, hilfmann. Not yours.’
Borsa realised his mistake. He backed away a pace or two, making sure the substantial bulk of the table was between him and Erak. His eyes slid away from the other man’s and there was an ugly silence. Finally, Ragnak seemed to realise that some form of backdown might be necessary – although not too much. He said, in an irritated tone: ‘Look, Erak, just go and get those taxes from Sten. And if he’s been holding out on purpose, bring him back here for trial. All right?’
‘And if he has a valid reason?’ Erak insisted.
The Oberjarl waved a hand in surrender. ‘If he has a valid reason, you can leave him alone. Does that suit you?’
Erak nodded. ‘Under those conditions, all right,’ he agreed.
Ragnak, who never knew when to let a matter drop, replied sarcastically, ‘Oh, really? Well, that is good of you, Jarl Erak. Now will you get on your way before it’s high summer?’