Ironfoot Read online

  praise for dave duncan

  “Rich, evocative language and superior narrative skills . . . one of the leading masters of epic fantasy.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Dave Duncan writes rollicking adventure novels filled with subtle characterization and made bitter-sweet by an underlying darkness. Without striving for grand effects or momentous meetings between genres, he has produced one excellent book after another.” —Locus

  “An exceedingly finished stylist and a master of world building and characterization.” —Booklist

  “Duncan writes with unusual flair, drawing upon folklore, myth, and his gift for creating ingenious plots.” —Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror

  “One of the best writers in the fantasy world today. His writing is clear, vibrant, and full of energy. His action scenes are breathtaking and his skill at characterization is excellent.” —Writers Write

  “Duncan’s prose avoids the excessively florid in its description and the archaic in its dialogue, opting instead for simpler narration and contemporary parlance . . . serves as a refreshing reminder that epic fantasy need not always be doorstops filled with manly men speaking in overblown rhetoric and grasping their swords.” —SFF World

  “Duncan produces excellent work in book after book . . . a great world-builder. His fantasy worlds are not mere medieval societies with magic added but make organic sense.” —SFReview

  “Dave Duncan has long been one of the great unsung figures of Canadian fantasy and science fiction, graced with a fertile imagination, a prolific output, and keen writerly skills.” —Quill and Quire

  also by dave duncan

  The Seventh Sword

  The Reluctant Swordsman

  The Coming of Wisdom

  The Destiny of the Sword

  The Death of Nnanji

  A Man of His Word

  Magic Casement

  Faery Lands Forlorn

  Perilous Seas

  Emperor and Clown

  A Handful of Men

  The Cutting Edge

  Upland Outlaws

  The Stricken Field

  The Living God

  Omar

  The Reaver Road

  The Hunters’ Haunt

  The Great Game

  Past Imperative

  Present Tense

  Future Indefinite

  The Years of Longdirk (as Ken Hood)

  Demon Sword

  Demon Rider

  Demon Knight

  The King’s Blades

  Tales of the King’s Blades

  The Gilded Chain

  Lord of the Fire Lands

  Sky of Swords

  Chronicles of the King’s Blades

  Paragon Lost

  Impossible Odds

  The Jaguar Knights

  The King’s Daggers

  Sir Stalwart

  The Crooked House

  Silvercloak

  Dodec

  Children of Chaos

  Mother of Lies

  Nostradamus

  The Alchemist’s Apprentice

  The Alchemist’s Code

  The Alchemist’s Pursuit

  Brothers Magnus

  Speak to the Devil

  When the Saints

  The Starfolk

  King of Swords

  Queen of Stars

  Standalone Novels

  A Rose-Red City

  Shadow

  West of January

  Strings

  Hero!

  The Cursed

  Daughter of Troy (as Sarah B. Franklin)

  Ill Met in the Arena

  Pock’s World

  Against the Light

  Wildcatter

  The Eye of Strife

  The Adventures of Ivor

  Irona 700

  Eocene Station

  Portal of a Thousand Worlds

  Copyright © 2017 by Dave Duncan

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Night Shade Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Night Shade books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Night Shade Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Night Shade Books® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.nightshadebooks.com.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Duncan, Dave, 1933- author.

  Title: Ironfoot / by Dave Duncan.

  Description: New York : Night Shade Books, [2017] | Series: The enchanter general ; book 1

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017006600| ISBN 9781597809177 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781597809306 (hardcover : acid-free paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Great Britain--History--Angevin period, 1154-1216--Fiction. | Great Britain--History--Henry II, 1154-1189--Fiction. | Great Britain--History--12th century--Fiction. | Magicians--Fiction. | Magic--Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9199.3.D847 I76 2017 | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006600

  Cover illustration by Stephen Youll

  Cover design by Shawn King

  eISBN 9781597806343

  Printed in the United States of America

  chapter 1

  eighty years before I was born, two of my forebears, housecarls of King Harold, the rightful king of England, died beside him at Hastings, fighting for their liege against Duke William’s Norman horde. Ever since then, Saxons have been underdogs in their ancestral land. My father, who should have inherited an earldom, was hostler for the Cistercian abbey at Pipewell, in Northamptonshire—he was a lay brother only and honorably married to my mother. In those days even priests were often married men.

  As a hostler’s son I grew up with horses. When I was nine years old, I tried to put one over a gate. My experiment ended with the horse on top, me on the ground, and the gate between us. My right leg was badly crushed and healed shorter than the other. Ever since I was able to walk again, I have worn a boot with a metal platform attached to the sole. And so Durwin son of Durwin became known as Ironfoot to everyone except his parents.

  So how did a lame Saxon boy make a living in an England ruled by Normans? How did he rise to be a royal confidant and advisor, enchanter general to three successive kings? It seemed a miracle at the time, and still does when I look back at how it happened. No, rather, it was three miracles.

  Firstly, the abbot was sympathetic. Every morning during the long months when my leg was in splints, he would send a couple of brawny novices to carry me to the abbey school, so I learned my letters, although I felt no call to take the tonsure. When I could walk properly again, I earned my bread by helping my father, for the abbey was steadily growing and acquiring more livestock. But I had younger brothers following me. As I approached manhood, I knew that I must soon find some way for a cripple to earn his living.

  The second miracle occurred when Sage Guy Delany stopped by the abbey. He was gentry and an old friend of the abbot, else the monks might have refused him hospitality, for sages were tainted with suspicions of witchcraft and devil worship.

  Guy was on his way to join the faculty at Helmdon, which in those days boasted one of the finest secular academies in England, or even in all Christendom. He was a large man, hefty, rubicund, and well dressed, with a
Norman’s haughty, well-fed look. He wore a sword and rode a spectacular hunter, the finest horse I had ever seen.

  When he prepared to leave the next morning, I humbly pointed out to him that his mount was close to shedding a shoe. My father doubled as the local farrier, but the abbot had sent him off to attend the horse fair at Northampton. Guy was in a hurry. He spoke to his friend the abbot, and soon they worked out a solution. Guy would ride off on one of the abbey’s horses, and I would go with him, riding another abbey horse and leading the packhorse that carried his baggage. The plan was that I would learn the road, and then make the journey three times more, at which point Guy would have his horse with him at Helmdon, and I would be back at Pipewell. It made an interesting break in my humdrum existence.

  Pipewell and Helmdon lie in the middle of England, but at opposite ends of Northamptonshire, and there is no grand highway between them, just trails winding through fields, meadowland, and forest. Even in summer it would be a very long day’s ride, but the weather then was appalling, and we got lost more than once. It took us almost three days.

  Guy was intrigued when he learned that I could read and write, for that was very unusual for an untonsured Saxon back then. According to the story he later told, I never stopped asking questions all the way to Helmdon.

  When we arrived there, he inspected the academy’s stable with disgust, and took me with him when he went to meet Odo le Brys, the dean. To my joy, I was offered the chance to attend classes as a servitor, meaning I would pay no fees, so long as I looked after Guy’s horse and the academy’s four—which were hacks compared with his. I could hardly believe my good fortune. I hastened back to Pipewell to obtain my father’s permission, which he readily granted.

  In the abbey most of the monks had been Saxons, but all the senior offices—abbot, prior, bursar, and so on—had been held by Normans. No one ever commented on that; it was just the way of the world. The distinction was much more obvious out in the secular world. In the academy all the sages and most adepts were Norman, as were most of the students, known as squires. Not many Saxon parents could afford to send sons to the academy, or had reason to. The few Saxon students were referred to as varlets, and tolerated as little better than vermin.

  At fourteen, I was already one of the older students, so the squires promptly ganged up on me to make sure I knew my place. When I reported to Sage Guy the next morning, he displayed neither surprise nor sympathy. He told me to strip so he could examine my injuries.

  “A few loose teeth,” he concluded, “and a couple of cracked ribs. I’ll cure those for you, but I’ll leave the bruises, because otherwise they’ll just give you more. You’ll have to learn to grovel better.”

  He then chanted a healing spell over me, which did what he had said it would. I was amazed, because the monks’ medical skills had been limited to potions and poultices. If chanting was what this Helmdon place taught, then I vowed to learn it. If I must crawl to learn, crawl I would.

  “Can you cure my game leg, master?” I whispered.

  “I might have managed that, had I been there when you smashed it, but I can’t now. Get dressed and we’ll start lessons.”

  The other sages reluctantly let me sit in on their lectures, but they became more accepting as they discovered I had both talent and ambition. Some conceded that I might make a good folk healer some day, even perhaps be certified as an adept. A sage? A Saxon sage? No chance at all.

  And even I accepted that—until the date I shall never forget: October 4, 1164. That was the day I stole a bag of tiles and was granted the third miracle.

  chapter 2

  the academy was a tiny establishment by today’s standards, just a circle of thatched cottages connected by a boardwalk. All the buildings had windows with shutters, though, and a few even had fieldstone chimneys, a recent innovation.

  In those days serious students who could afford it attended the University of Paris, but King Henry forbade that a few years later, in 1167. Now England has several academies grander than Helmdon ever was, especially the one in Oxford. Still, with a faculty of six qualified sages and five adepts, Helmdon was then one of the largest and most respected schools in the country. Its student enrollment at that time comprised eight Norman “squires” and four Saxons “varlets.”

  Helmdon claimed to turn out men—never women—familiar with all human knowledge, and it pretty much succeeded. It taught the wisdom of the ancients as it had been handed down to us, including all topics except holy matters, which were reserved for the Church’s schools. The curriculum included alchemy, arithmetic, astrology, geometry, grammar, herbalism, history, law, literature, logic, music, numeration, reading, writing, and rhetoric. And also antique song, which was what the common folk called enchantment.

  Enchantment was what really mattered, of course.

  The Church regarded secular schools with suspicion, some bishops even arguing that any learning other than Bible study was a fast road to Hell, but we could quote Church Fathers like St. Augustine against them. In practice academies were tolerated as long as they did not infringe on religion, which the Church interpreted as broadly as possible. It especially frowned upon the field of study officially called antique song, denouncing it as heresy, superstition, and blasphemy. Confessors could impose fearsome penances on those who used such art, but in practice tended to turn a deaf ear, because the bishops knew that any effort to suppress enchantment would arouse the wrath of the great lords, almost all of whom employed house sages—officially to advise them on law, medicine, correspondence, and so on, for almost no other laymen in England could read, and no one quite trusted even the humblest cleric not to tattle secrets to the nearest bishop.

  Enchantment was a large part of a house sage’s duties. The king himself employed an enchanter general, and several lesser enchanters under him. The common people put no faith in a medicinal potion that had not been fortified by a chant or two. The monks had never told me that.

  The ancient spells were recorded in precious grimoires, some of them centuries old. Helmdon’s library of grimoires was one of the finest in England, containing no less than fifty-six books, plus numerous sheets and scrolls tucked away in muniment chests. The spells were mostly written in Latin or French, both of which came in a great variety of dialects. A few texts were in Greek, Hebrew, or even the old tongue, the language of England before the Conquest. Most Normans could understand some of that, or even make themselves understood in it to an extent. I, of course, had learned it at my mother’s knee, and I could even read it and write it, which was extremely rare.

  Sage Guy, my mentor and tutor, was more open-minded than most of the faculty, and one day it occurred to him to investigate what cabalistic knowledge might be hidden away in these neglected old tongue writings. After six years instructing me, he had come to treat me as if I were an adept, which few others did. I was twenty years old, after all, older than many of the adepts, and no longer a juvenile chatterbox.

  So he set me the task of collecting all that material. The other sages willingly parted with what they had, because they regarded us Saxons as ignorant buffoons—which we were by then, of course, after a century of oppression. They forgot the splendid English culture their ancestors had destroyed in the Conquest.

  Guy and I were both astounded by the amount of material we accumulated. He had to order the carpenter in Northampton to make a new chest to hold it all.

  There were no classes on Sundays, but that particular Sunday an everlasting deluge was keeping everyone indoors. Guy, thoroughly bored, decreed we would not be breaking the Lord’s commandments if we looked over the collection. In the course of half an afternoon we set aside any spells that seemed to duplicate others we already knew in modern languages. Then we selected a few short single-voice spells and I chanted them for him. Several of them worked, too—one of them summoned people by name, I remember. Although its range was too limited to be very useful, even men who had little fluency in the old tongue would come running. Anoth
er chant would sober up a drunk. I memorized that one and have often found it helpful over the years.

  The two-voice spells were trickier, but Guy insisted on trying out a couple of those also. He put his agile mind to it and studied the text with me until he could pronounce it and understand it thoroughly, because merely mouthing the words will not work. Then I chanted the versicles, and he the responses, as cantor. One of the spells worked, the other did not, but that was always a problem. More than half the spells in the grimoires never worked.

  We were about to call it a day when we discovered, at the bottom of the chest, a shabby leather bag containing a set of stone tiles about a thumb-joint in size. There were thirty-seven of them; one was blank and each of the others was engraved with a sign of an ancient alphabet.

  “Runes,” Guy said dismissively.

  “Futhorc!” I had met those signs before. Futhorc was the ancient Anglo-Saxon version of runes, the alphabet used by pagans before the blessings of the True Faith were brought to our island five hundred years ago. I had seen a script about them back at Pipewell, in the abbey library, so I was able to tell Guy what each symbol meant, but not why they had been so carefully engraved on tiles.

  “Not teaching,” he said, frowning. “Divination, maybe? To respond to an incantation without the need for a cantor?”

  We both turned to the heap of documents we had discarded. Lame as I was, my youth made me nimble, and he was growing almost portly. So I flopped down on the floor, and he pulled up his chair, and we began hunting for anything that might relate to the tiles. I glanced at each scroll in turn and told him what it was as I handed it to him, for spells are always known by their opening words.

  Most of them got tossed back in the chest, but we kept back three single-voiced invocations that sought an answer. All three invoked the Wyrds, the pagan goddesses of destiny, with the enchanter demanding to know what was in store for him. All three were written in the Christian alphabet. Two were almost identical, while the third was a separate creation, completely different.

  “Try them,” Guy said.

  I moved to a chair near the window, for rain was still pounding down, making the cottage dim. I spread the tiles on the table, within reach, then chanted the first of the three spells, which began Spricest ðu, “Do you speak?” I felt no sense of acceptance, so I did not bother to reach for any tiles. Then I tried the two versions of Hwæt segst, meaning “What do you say?” With the first I again felt no response, but halfway through the second . . . maybe. It was very faint, and it died away before I reached the end of the chant. By then chanters always know if a spell is going to work.