John Flanagan: Oakleaf bearers

"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 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.

Sometimes the Ranger could be confusing, and Horace thought it best to forget the whole conversation. Yet, 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.

"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 would.

"Of course they do," Halt replied. "The mountains form their principal line of defense."

"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 had yet to settle on any one of them.

"I'll think of something," he temporized, 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 a warrior 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.

E RAK S TARFOLLOWER, WOLFSHIP CAPTAIN AND ONE OF THE senior war jarls of the Skandians, made his way through the low-ceilinged, wood-paneled 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-sat Ragnak and Borsa, their heads bowed over a pile of parchment scrolls. Erak recognized 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 shortchange Ragnak or claim any deduction that wouldn't pass Borsa's fine-tooth 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. The tortuous arguments and recalculation of amounts owing after all deductions had been approved and agreed were not for him. Erak opted for a more direct course, which consisted of seizing the person under investigation, ramming a double-headed broadax 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 toward 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.