He set the knife back on the floor, sat down at the edge of the bed with a massive forearm across his eyes. Gerin understood that; now he noticed his own throbbing head, and Van's had to be ten times worse. The outlander stood again, this time to use the chamber pot. Gerin also understood that. "Pass it to me when you're done," he said.
"I thought I was lost in a black pit," Van said wonderingly. "Things were looking at me, I know they were, but I couldn't see even the shine of their eyes—too dark. How could I fight them if I couldn't see them?" He shuddered, then groaned. "I wish my head would fall off. Even the moonlight hurts my eyes."
"I had a dark dream, too, though I don't remember as much of it as you do," Gerin said. Analytical even hung over, he went on, "Odd, that. You've drunk much more than I have, yet you recall more. I wonder why."
"Captain, I don't give a—" Van's reply was punctuated by a frightened wail that came in through the window with the overbrilliant moonlight. The Fox recognized the innkeeper's voice, even distorted by fear.
More than his headache, more than his own bad dream, that fear kept him from falling back to sleep. Van said nothing but, by the way he tossed and fidgeted, he lay a long time wakeful, too.
* * *
Breakfast the next morning was not a happy time. Gerin spooned up barley porridge with his eyes screwed into slits against the daylight. Van drew up a bucket of water from the well outside the inn and poured it over his head. He came back in dripping and snorting, but turned aside with a shudder from the bowl of porridge the innkeeper offered him.
The innkeeper did his best to seem jolly, but his smiles, although they stretched his mouth wide, failed to reach his eyes. Little by little, he stopped pretending, and grew almost as somber as his suffering guests. "I have some word of the Sibyl, good my sirs," he said.
"Tell us," Gerin urged. "You'll give me something to think about besides my poor decrepit carcass." Van did not seem capable of coherent speech, but nodded—cautiously, as if afraid the least motion might make his head fall off.
The innkeeper said, "I hear she still lies asleep in the bed where the priests put her, now and again thrashing and crying out, as if she has evil dreams."
"I wonder if hers are the same as mine and Van's," Gerin said: "darkness and unseen things moving through it."
"I saw—or rather, did not see—the same last night." The innkeeper gave a theatrical shiver. His eyes flicked over to Dyaus' altar by the fireplace. The king of the gods might hold the ghosts at bay, but seemed powerless against these more frightening seemings that came in the night.
Van made a hoarse croaking noise, then said, "I wonder what Aragis dreamt last night." He didn't quite whisper, but used only a small piece of his big voice: more would have hurt him.
"Are you sure you won't eat something?" Gerin asked him. "We'll want to do a lot of traveling today, to get beyond the wood and also past that peasant village where they hunted us in the night."
"I'm sure," Van said, quietly still. "You'd make a fine mother hen, Captain, but if I put aught in my belly now, we'd just lose time stopping the wagon so I could go off into the woods and unspit."
"You know best," the Fox said. The porridge was bland as could be, but still sat uncertainly in his own stomach, and lurched when he stood up. "I do think we ought to go upstairs and don our armor, though. However much we hurt, we're liable to have some handwork ahead of us."
"Aye, you're right," Van answered. "I'd be happier to sit here a while—say, a year or two—till I feel I might live, or even want to, but you're right." With careful stride, he made his way to the stairs and up them. Gerin followed.
The rasps and clangs of metal touching metal made the Fox's head hurt and, by Van's mutters, did worse to him. "Don't know how I'm supposed to fight, even if I have to," Gerin said. "If I could drive somebody away by puking on him, I might manage that, but I'm not good for much more."
"I feel the same way," Van said, "but no matter how sick I am, if it's a choice between fighting and dying, I expect I'll do the best job of fighting I can."
"Can't argue with that," Gerin said. "If you think I'll be looking for a fight today, though, you're daft."
"Nor I, and I'm a sight fonder of them than you are," Van said. "The thing of it is, a fight may be looking for you."
"Why do you think I'm doing this?" Gerin shrugged his shoulders a couple of times to fit his corselet as comfortably as he could, then jammed his bronze pot of a helm over his head. Sighing, he said, "Let's go."
"Just a moment." Van adjusted the cheekpieces to his own fancy helm, then nodded. By his pained expression, that hurt, too. Anticipating still more future pain, he said, "And we'll have to listen to the cursed wagon wheels squeaking all the rest of the day, too."
Gerin hadn't thought of that. When he did, his stomach churned anew. "We've got to do something about that," he declared.
"Stay here a while longer?" Van suggested.
"We've stayed too long already, thanks to you and your carouse. Curse me if I want to spend another useless day here because you drank the ale jar dry—and I helped, I admit it," the Fox added hastily. He plucked at his beard. Thinking straight and clear through a pounding headache was anything but easy, but after a few seconds he snapped his fingers. "I have it! I'll beg a pot of goose grease or chicken fat or whatever he has from the innkeeper. It won't be perfect, the gods know, but it should cut the noise to something we have hope of standing."
Van managed the first smile he'd risked since he woke up. He made as if to slap Gerin on the back, but thought better of it; perhaps he imagined how he would have felt had someone bestowed a similar compliment on him in his present delicate condition. "By the gods, Captain, it can't hurt," he exclaimed. "I was thinking we'd have to suffer the whole day long, and no help for it."
"No point in suffering if you don't have to," Gerin said. "And I can't think of a better way to use wits than to keep from suffering."
The innkeeper produced a pot of chicken fat without demur, though he said, "There's a cure for a long night I never ran across before."
"Aye, that's just what it is, but not the way you mean." The Fox explained why he wanted the fat. The innkeeper looked bemused, but nodded.
Gerin crawled under the wagon and applied a good coat of grease to both axles. When he came out and stood up again, Van said, "We'll draw flies."
"No doubt," Gerin said. "After a while, it'll go bad and start to stink, too, and somebody will have to scrub it off. For today, it'll be quieter. Wouldn't you say that's worth it?"
"Oh, aye, you get no quarrel from me there." Van's laugh was but a faint echo of his usual booming chortle, but it served. "Thing of it is, I'm usually the one with no thought but for today and you're always fretting about tomorrow or the year after or when your grandson's an old graybeard. Odd to find us flip-flopped so."
The Fox considered that, then set it aside. "Too much like philosophy for early in the day, especially after too much ale the night before. Shall we be off?"
"Might as well," Van said. "Can I humbly beg you to take the reins for the first part of the go? I don't think you hurt yourself as bad as I did."
"Fair enough." Gerin clambered onto the seat at the front of the wagon. The reins slid across the calluses on his palms. Van got up beside him, moving with an old man's caution.
"The lord Biton bless the both of you, good my sirs," the groom said.
Gerin flicked the reins. The horses leaned forward against their harness. The wagon rolled ahead. It still rattled and creaked and jounced, but didn't squeak nearly as much as it had. Van looked wanly happy. "That's first rate," he said. "With even a bit o' luck, I'll feel like living by noon or so."