The Redemption of Althalus (5 page)

The toll taker doubled over, howling with laughter.

“I felt sort of sorry for the poor beast, and maybe just a little bit guilty about the whole business. I’ll be honest about it right here and now, friend. I
did
cheat the wolf a few times during our game, and just to make up for that I let him keep his tail—for decency’s sake, of course.”

“Oh, that’s a rare story, friend!” The chortling toll taker said, clapping Althalus on the back with one meaty hand. “Gosti’s
got
to hear this one!” And he insisted on accompanying Althalus across the rickety bridge, through the shabby village of log-walled and thatch-roofed huts, and on up to the imposing log fort that overlooked the village and the bridge that crossed the foaming river.

They entered the fort and proceeded into the smoky main hall. Althalus had visited many of the clan halls in the highlands of Arum, so he was familiar with these people’s relaxed approach to neatness, but Gosti’s hall elevated untidiness to an art form. Like most clan halls, this one had a dirt floor with a fire pit in the center. The floor was covered with rushes, but the rushes appeared not to have been changed for a dozen years or so. Old bones and assorted other kinds of garbage rotted in the corners, and hounds—and pigs—dozed here and there. It was the first time Althalus had ever encountered pigs as house pets. There was a rough-hewn table across the front of the hall, and seated at that table stuffing food into his mouth with both hands sat the fattest man Althalus had ever seen. There could be no question about the man’s identity, since Gosti Big Belly came by his name honestly. He had piglike little eyes, and his pendulous lower lip hung down farther than his chin. A full haunch of roasted pork lay on the greasy table in front of him, and he was ripping great chunks of meat from that haunch and stuffing them into his mouth. Just behind him stood a huge man with hard, unfriendly eyes.

“Are we disturbing him at lunchtime?” Althalus murmured to his guide.

The tattooed clansman laughed. “Not really,” he replied. “With Gosti, it’s a little hard to tell exactly which meal he’s eating, since they all sort of run together. Gosti eats all the time, Althalus. I’ve never actually seen him do it, but there are some here who swear that he even eats while he’s asleep. Come along. I’ll introduce you to him—and to his cousin Galbak, too.”

They approached the table. “Ho, Gosti!” the tattooed man said loudly to get the fat man’s attention. “This is Althalus. Have him tell you the story of how he came by this fine wolf-eared tunic of his.”

“All right,” Gosti replied in a deep, rumbling voice, taking a gulp of mead from his drinking horn. He squinted at Althalus with his little pig-like eyes. “You don’t mind if I keep eating while you tell me the story, do you?”

“Not at all, Gosti,” Althalus said. “You
do
appear to have a little gaunt spot under your left thumbnail, and I certainly wouldn’t want you to start wasting away right in front of my eyes.”

Gosti blinked, and then he roared with laughter, spewing greasy pork all over the table. Galbak, however, didn’t so much as crack a smile.

Althalus expanded the story of his dice game with the wolf into epic proportions, and by nightfall he was firmly ensconced in the chair beside the enormous fat man. After he’d told various versions of the story several times for the entertainment of all the fur-clad clansmen who drifted into the hall, he invented other stories to fill the hall of Gosti Big Belly with nearly continuous mirth. No matter how hard he tried, however, Althalus could never get so much as a smile out of the towering Galbak.

He wintered there, and he was more than welcome to sit at Gosti’s table, eating Big Belly’s food and drinking his mead, as long as he could come up with new stories and jokes to keep Gosti’s belly bouncing up and down with laughter. Gosti’s own occasional contributions obviously bored his clansmen, since they were largely limited to boasts about how much gold he had stored away in his strong room. The clansmen had evidently heard those stories often enough to know them all by heart. Althalus found them moderately fascinating, however.

The winter plodded on until it was finally spring, and by then Althalus knew every corner of Big Belly’s hall intimately.

The strong room wasn’t too hard to locate, since it was usually guarded. It was at the far end of the corridor where the dining hall was located, and three steps led up to the heavy door. A massive bronze lock strongly suggested that things of value were kept inside.

Althalus noticed that the nighttime guards didn’t take their jobs very seriously, and by midnight they were customarily fast asleep—a condition not uncommon among men who take large jugs of strong mead to work with them.

All that was left to do now was to wait for the snow to melt—and to stay on the good side of Gosti and his sour-faced giant cousin. If all went well, Althalus would be in a hurry when he left. Galbak had very long legs, so Althalus didn’t want deep snow in the passes to slow him down enough for Galbak to catch up with him.

Althalus took to frequently stepping out into the courtyard to check the progress of the spring thaw, and when the last snowdrift disappeared from a nearby pass, he decided that the time had come for him to take his leave.

As it turned out, the strong room of Gosti Big Belly wasn’t nearly as strong as Gosti thought it was, and late one night when the fire in the pit in the center of the hall had burned down to embers and Gosti and his clansmen were filling the corners with drunken snores, Althalus went to that strong room, stepped over the snoring guards, undid the simple latch, and slipped inside to transfer some ownership. There was a crude table and a sturdy bench in the center of the room and a pile of heavy-looking skin bags in one corner. Althalus took up one of the bags, carried it to the table, and sat down to count his new wealth.

The bag was about the size of a man’s head, and it was loosely tied shut. Althalus eagerly opened the bag, reached his hand inside, and drew out a fistful of coins.

He stared at the coins with a sinking feeling. They were all copper. He dug out another fistful. There were a few yellow coins this time, but they were brass, not gold. Then he emptied the bag out onto the table.

Still no gold.

Althalus raised the torch he’d brought with him to survey the room—maybe Gosti kept his gold in a different pile. There was only the one pile, however. Althalus picked up two more bags and poured their contents onto the table as well. More copper sprinkled with a little brass lay on the now-littered table.

He quickly emptied out all the bags, and there wasn’t a single gold coin in any of them. Gosti had hoodwinked him, and he’d evidently hoodwinked just about everybody in Arum as well.

Althalus began to swear. He’d just wasted an entire winter watching a fat man eat. Worse yet, he’d believed all the lies that slobbering fat man had told him. He resisted the strong temptation to return to the hall and to rip Gosti up the middle with his dagger. Instead he sat down to pick the brass coins out of the heaps of copper. He knew that he wouldn’t get enough to even begin to pay him for his time, but it’d be better than nothing at all.

After he’d leached all the brass out of the heaps of copper, he stood up and disdainfully tipped the table over to dump all the nearly worthless copper coins onto the floor, and left in disgust.

He went out of the hall, crossed the muddy courtyard, and walked on through the shabby village, cursing his own gullibility and brooding darkly about his failure to take a look into the strong room to verify the fat man’s boasting.

Fortune, that most fickle Goddess, had tricked him again. His luck hadn’t changed after all.

Despite his bitter disappointment, he stepped right along. He hadn’t left Gosti’s strong room in a very tidy condition, and it wouldn’t be long until the fat man realized that he’d been robbed. The theft hadn’t been very large, but it still might not be a bad idea to cross a few clan boundaries—just to be on the safe side. Galbak had the look of a man who wouldn’t shrug things off, and Althalus definitely wanted a long head start on Gosti’s hard-faced cousin.

After a few days of hard travel, Althalus felt that it was safe enough to stop by a tavern to get a decent meal. Like just about everyone else on the frontiers, Althalus carried a sling, and he was quite skilled with it. He could get by on an occasional rabbit or squirrel, but he was definitely in the mood for a full meal.

He approached a shabby village tavern, but stopped just outside the doorway when he hear someone saying, “—a wolf-skin tunic with the ears still on.” He stepped back from the door to listen.

“Gosti Big Belly’s fit to be tied,” the man who’d just mentioned the tunic went on. “It seems that this Althalus fellow’d just spent the whole winter eating Gosti’s food and drinking his mead, and he showed his gratitude by sneaking into Gosti’s strong room and stealing two full bags of gold coins.”

“Shocking!” somebody else murmured. “What did you say this thief looked like?”

“Well, as I understand it, he’s about medium sized and he’s got a black beard, but that description fits about half the men in Arum. It’s that wolf-eared tunic that gives him away. Gosti’s cousin Galbak is offering a huge reward for the fellow’s head, but for all of me, he can keep his reward. It’s those two bags of gold this Althalus fellow’s carrying that interest me. I’m going to track him down, believe me. I’d like to introduce him to the busy end of my spear, and I won’t even bother to cut off his head to sell to Galbak.” The man gave a cynical laugh. “I’m not a greedy man, friends. Two bags of gold are more than enough to satisfy me.”

Althalus stepped around to the side of the tavern to swear. It was the irony of it all that stung so much. Gosti desperately wanted everybody in Arum to believe that he was rich. That absurd reward offer was nothing more than a way for the fat man to verify his boasts. Gosti, still eating with both hands, was probably laughing himself sick right now. Althalus had stolen no more than a handful of brass coins, and now he’d have to run for his life. Gosti would get the fame, and Althalus now had Galbak on his trail and every man in Arum looking for him—with a knife.

Obviously though, he was going to have to get rid of his splendid new tunic, and that
really
bit deep. He went back to the door and peeked inside to identify the man who’d just described him. What had happened had been Gosti’s doing, but Gosti wasn’t around to punish, so that loud-mouthed tavern loafer was going to have to fill in for him.

Althalus etched the man’s features in his mind, and then he went outside the village to wait and watch.

Dusk was settling over the mountains of Arum when the fellow lurched out of the tavern and came wobbling out to the main trail that passed the village. He was carrying a short spear with a broad-bladed bronze tip, and he was whistling tunelessly.

He stopped whistling when Althalus savagely clubbed him to the ground.

Then Althalus dragged him back into the bushes at the side of the trail. He turned the unconscious man over. “I understand you’ve been looking for me,” he said sardonically. “Was there something you wanted to discuss?”

He peeled the man’s knitted smock off the limp body, removed his own splendid tunic, and regretfully dropped it on his would-be assassin’s face. Then he put on the shabby tunic, stole the man’s purse and spear, and left the vicinity.

Althalus didn’t have a very high opinion of the man he’d just robbed, so he was fairly certain that the idiot would actually wear that tunic, and that might help to muddy the waters. The description the fellow had been spreading around had mentioned a black beard, so when the sun rose the following morning, Althalus stopped by a forest pool where he could see his reflection in the surface of the water and painfully shaved with his bronze dagger.

Once that had been taken care of, he decided that it might be prudent to continue his northward journey along the ridgelines rather than in the canyons. His shave and his change of clothing had probably disguised him enough to conceal his identity from people who were searching for somebody with a black beard and a wolf-eared tunic, but a fair number of men had stopped by Gosti’s hall during the preceding winter, and if some of those guests were among the searchers, they’d probably recognize him. And if
they
didn’t, Gosti’s cousin Galbak certainly would. Althalus knew the Arums well enough to be certain that they’d stay down in the canyons to conduct their search, since climbing the ridges would be terribly inconvenient and there weren’t many taverns up on top where they could rest and refresh themselves. Althalus was positive that no real Arum could ever be found more than a mile away from the nearest tavern.

He climbed the ridge with a sense of bitterness dogging his heels. He’d make good his escape, of course. He was too clever to be caught. What really cankered at his soul was the fact that his escape would just reinforce Gosti’s boasts. Gosti’s reputation as the richest man in Arum would be confirmed by the fact that the greatest thief in the world had made a special trip to Arum just to rob him. Althalus mournfully concluded that his bad luck was still dogging his heels.

Up on the ridgeline, the sodden remains of last winter’s snowdrifts made for slow going, but Althalus slogged his way north. There wasn’t much game up here on the ridges, so he frequently went for days without eating.

As he sourly struggled north, he once again heard that peculiar wailing sound he’d first noticed back in the mountains on his way to Gosti’s fort the previous autumn. Evidently it was still out there, and he began to wonder if maybe it was following him for some reason. Whatever it was, it was noisy, and its wailing cries echoing back from the mountainsides began to make Althalus distinctly edgy.

It wasn’t a wolf; Althalus was sure of that. Wolves travel in packs, and this was a solitary creature. There was an almost despairing quality about its wailing. He eventually concluded that it was most probably the mating season for that particular creature, and that its mournful, hollow cries were nothing more than an announcement to others of its species that it would really like to have some company along about now. Whatever it was, Althalus began to fervently wish that it’d go look for companionship elsewhere, since those unearthly cries of absolute despair were beginning to get on his nerves.