pugbutter — Roleplayer Guild

	Unlike their friend, the men on the hill had nowhere to be; nowhere else but there, at least. Any wives and sons and soldiers were off seeing staunchly to their duties, which left the elders free to worry about none than their own, too. Indeed, their punctuality afforded them a rare opportunity, and they would not squander it by waiting til the morrow's war-talks to start sizing up any friends and allies they may need to start swaying early, and, inversely, any snakes in the grass. Swidda swiped little peeks at his master while the scene had the whole of the latter's attention. Whether he also aspired Swidda could not say, but that in itself was testament to the Acani chief's shrewdness. Many would behold him and see only the bearded chin, the sun-streaked mane, the body built for cleaving an axe through bough and bone. To search into that louring countenance they would hear nothing but like a whistle through the trees. Only the generous among them could fancy him a "thinking" creature, for his thoughts no doubt resounded of meat and beer and cunt and no further. But Gederik was watching. He watched the flags and the trumpets, and the grey of his eyes cut through this display, like the shriek of a winter wind, to watch the beating of the hearts, too. 

	His comment was coming true: this procession was not the whole tale, but already it proved a valuable prelude. How a man behaved under scrutiny and in secrecy; when his schemes bloomed and when they moldered; façades would fade and fall in the days to come. This moment, though some of these chiefs may not have known it, was the moment they made their first promises to these people, and to all the clayfolk waiting for news in farther places. Gederik and Swidda did not speak much as they watched the retinues lumber through. The retinues said more than enough.

	Four gowned men came next, carrying a litter chair shrouded in lapis wool. Either of the Acani representatives could have conceded that they were intrigued for a moment, wondering what—who—the compartment contained. Yet this leader, whoever he was, had gathered a large party to guard him, and to chant his incantations. He hid his appearance, but not his arrival; the priests crooned and bleated, but from their lyrics alone no one could say who their God was or what He wanted. Either he had a lot of soldiers to show off or he had genuinely seen great perils in his future along the road and unto its destination. In equal turns ergo this man seemed strong and all too eager to appear as such. The mystery was the desired effect, an affectation. Swidda would have to reserve judgment for the leader who stepped out of the box; the teak planks themselves were worthless. He looked over at Gederik again, but could not discern whether he had gleaned something more from this show.

	Kerentanam and his Black Lady needed no introduction and they knew it. They blared no trumpets, and wore no sigils or insignia but for the simplest of tribal colors. The guards walked in tight formation, but with spears and shields slung lazily over weary soldiers. An advisor; a manservant or two; a cupbearer; a quartermaster to keep them all fed. For most men this would have made for a dangerously sparse accompaniment. But any brigand captain who would attack Kerentanam in the passes would then have to dance with the gods who watched over him as keenly as the clayfolk watched him now. Yes, the serfs, the freedmen; this petty-king had nothing at all to prove to them, except that they were not his enemy—that they were not his uncle and the rest of his treasonous kin—at least, that they had given him no reason yet to think so.

	The wife was as lovely as the stories foretold, if not lovelier, well deserving her handsome warlord in kind. But the old man on the hill could not relish her beauty for long, for the crows had gathered. The stories told of them, too. True enough, Arlanna could have bought their attention with a prickle of blood from her finger; maybe a fish or two, fat with eggs, thrown over the sacrificial hearth; a subtler effect than the man in the litter chair could muster. Then, the birds really could have been the children of Rūnla, one more goddess of two dozen said to be dabbling at Kerentanam's fate-strings. Swidda found it likelier, however, that they could smell the death on her. He did not know whether birds could salivate, but he swore they looked to be drooling, for a feast of flesh that the Black Lady was still preparing for them at her rune-bones and her bowl of fire.

	The others on the hill had noticed too. The children clapped with glee as they will, easily amused by wild animals. However, their parents paid the sight a startled reverence. They wore shades of scowl and sneer, unsure as to who this portent favored, and what future it proclaimed for them. Swidda himself felt a cold shuddering up his spine; returning his attention to the Lady herself, he found that she was watching him back, and although he held her curiosity for a mere moment, in that moment he was as naked as a hare crossing a grassless field. His very muscles laxed when this huntress, this owl, passed out of sight.

	"You felt it too."

	Gederik was watching him. Swidda realized that the breath had gone hot and stale in his chest; he had not exhaled in some time.

	"Yes," the old man coughed.

	"Hmmm." The chieftain offered none of his insights this time, merely turning to watch the gulch again.

	Yet while Kerentanam's aim was evident, he had not yet nocked and drawn; he was not king. And before that day—before Lubbo—neither of the Acanis' ambassadors could have claimed to have seen a king in person. They had seen him on ingots, of course, a caricature with fat wormy lips and with marbles for eyes. These little silver pocket-portraits regularly reached Ostoparda, and spread out from that city to its suburbs and the further countryside, where they were traded for coal and furs and lumber. Lubbo himself, though he now looked far more intricate than the arts of the moneyers' chisels, was still but a man under early surveyorship; a man with a nice hide-cloak and a strong sword, true, but a man still. He could have fit in well enough among the other chiefs, then arriving with the evening sun to their backs. But he had instead slipped into camp in the late-watches, or in the next early morn, when Swidda had long since retired to his bedding. When the sage next awoke, he was not met with the king himself, but with banners; a field of banners; a sea of them; hundreds, thousands of standards and streamers, the embroidery of battle. He was quick to dress; he heard shouting from his camp, a nearby tent. He could not see the whole of the army through the trees and the crags but the din of their own camps was both everywhere and unmistakable: the sizzle of bacon, the blacksmith's tin-tin, the pitching of stakes into soft earth. Overnight the ranks of Skeldefjarn had doubled if not more.

	"What the fuck is he doing?" asked Aunstō. He and Gederik had already convened at the latter's tent. Allorn was not with them, probably helping her mother with the morning bread-baking.

	"I don't know."

	"Sage, get over here. What have the gods said to this?"

	"I—I haven't, we haven't convened, I mean, communicated, in—"

	"'I, I, I, I haven't, we haven't,'" Aunstō jeered.

	"Leave him be," hissed Gederik, who watched warily at the mouth of the tent. A team of four men, a druid among them, worked hard just outside, sculpting wet clay into the idols which would watch over the entrance in the days to come. Until their completion and their sanctification, however, two warriors stood guard with shields and short axes. They pretended not to hear the quarrel at all.

	"Not until he answers me this one thing." Aunstō was jabbing his finger at any sternum which stood still enough to take it. "Did you two old, trusting fucks lead me, and my wife and daughter—did you guide us right into the throat of another southern wolf?"

	The colors had retreated from Swidda's face, although for now he did not fear their neighbor chieftain's blade, nor the hand it would so arm. His thoughts went back to the teak box for a time, that earliest of envoys; the question it had invoked. Was this simply Lubbo's perverse idea of a grand demonstration? But he was said to be shrewd, and a shrewd man would have known better than to invite such envy, and such enmity. No doubt it could be prudent to appear stronger than he was, to intimidate one's littler foes and so quash their mutinous thoughts; but Lubbo had to have seen how this would look to the villagers, and worse still, the rest of the petty-kings; who had come relatively unguarded, unarmed, and readier to tussle with tongues than with weapons.

	The rumors could have been false. Lubbo could have been a half-fool, a mud-in-his-skull, fattened on the sweet flatteries of a sycophant court. But words did not oft travel so far on such brittle wings as that. Swidda could be as sure in that answer as he was in all the others, which is to say it still tumbled and jostled with the rest of them behind that sloped, noble forehead.

	"I do not doubt that he comes as a conqueror. But if he is as cunning as they say," said Swidda shakily, "then he would not use an invasion, a—a civil war, at a time like this. I promise you, the tribes would never allow a betrayal of that scale, and he would know that."

	Aunstō seemed moved for a time. "Big 'if,'" he murmured. "Try the taste of this one next: if you're wrong, and if my family is in danger here ..."

	"You don't need to say it. I know."

	"Good. Get out of my way." He was gone as soon as he had pushed past Gederik at the entrance, and the guards and toilers behind it. Gederik moved at once to place a steadying hand at the tremble of his friend's shoulder.

	"Please forgive him, old friend. He is only passionate," said Gederik. "Even if the worst has happened ... we'd rather Lubbo as king than the Nhirian."

	"He would not be the worst choice," Swidda conceded weakly.

	"You should break your fast. Maybe calm yourself by the river again. I will call the horns for you when we're starting up the hill."

	The old sage nodded, and took his own hand tenderly to the one which had been placed upon his shoulder. They squeezed, and departed in better company. Yet as Swidda looked over the hill, to the menhir, he felt weak under its shadow. The shadow itself looked feebler, too, flickering and trembling at its edges, where the war-standards fluttered by the light of sunrise. An army had come for Skeldefjarn, albeit far sooner than they had expected, and under unfamiliar colors.

	It did not matter whether this Lubbo was a wolf or a dog, Swidda could not help but remark. The only difference between these beasts was how deeply they hunger before they bite. Maybe a hound had to starve first, but it would eat its master all the same.

	But Gederik was right, too, that the babbling of the Grauglang would do well by Swidda's health, and so he embarked over the first of several hills, hoping that not too many soldiers had gathered there already to fill their canteens and wash their socks. He may not have been able to bear to know that other troubles were already stirring within the village borders; that they already strained to accommodate this new host.

	At the community center, where the oven was built, old women crossed their arms and huffed in rows. For soldiers had pushed them aside to bake their morning ashcakes from their barley rations. Likewise, the whole of this village had subsided quite adequately, for many generations, on but a single well, dug not far from the same epicenter. The soldiers were here too, lashing ropes to their jugs and suspending them down the hole, that they may drink their posca and their weak-ale cold. So stuffed with jugs and bladders was this well ere long that no one could raise the bucket to draw water. The waits were long, the facilities few, the spaces tight (and tightening still), and the ground the hosts so carefully treaded grew more strained by the minute.

	But the guests exchanged their first true blows at the outskirts. Whereas the earliest comers had circled their camps around the menhir hill, Lubbo's baggage train had no choice but to scatter through the woods, settling its tents and fire-rings wherever the foliage broke. Anyone coming behind him likewise had to make do with whatever free space could be scrounged: along the road, up the slick, mossy slope of a shadowed hill, under the roots of a fallen pine ...

	A small host, quite ramshackle in appearance and decorum, had been moving through a few of the Bladetaker's camps when three soldiers of Lubbo's ran out and seized a goat, seemingly from among the new ranks. They claimed that it had belonged to them all along, but that it had escaped its restraints and ran into the ranks of the smaller party. The latter, of course, insisted instead that the animal was theirs, and that the Bladetaker's men were staging a pathetic burglary.

	"What's more, by your own account," said one, "the goat has chosen us its shepherds, has it not?" This insult drew the first sword, and by the time an officer or two had caught wind of the squabble blood may already have wet the forest floor. Dozens of men were circling round to watch. A hand's-ful more ran for their commanders.

	"Trouble, Your Majesty. There's been a disciplinary matter in the left van's camp."

	"Lord Anabinpāl, an infantryman is reporting violence at the rear of the train. Someone was stolen from, apparently."
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