Tale of the Fox gtf-2

by Harry Turtledove

  She said, "Obey me now and you may yet survive. Give over your vain resistance and you will be able to live out your full span most honored among all those not lucky enough to be born of the blood of my folk."

  Did that mean the people who worshiped her or the people she'd invented? Gerin had never thought he'd have the chance to ask a god that philosophical riddle, and, with the moment here, discovered having the chance and having the nerve were two different things.

  He said, "I'll take my chances. I may end up dead, but that strikes me as better than living under your people-and under you. Or I may end up alive and free. Till the time comes, you never know-and we Elabonians have gods, too."

  Voldar tossed her head again. "Are you sure? If you do, where are they? Drunk? Asleep? Dead? I have hardly noticed them, I tell you that. The Trokmoi have gods-aye, gods who flee before me. But you folk here? Who would know? I think you pray to emptiness."

  Gerin knew he could not afford to give full heed to anything she told him. She had her own interest, and fooling him and dismaying him were to her advantage. But what she said about the Trokm- gods paralleled all too well what had happened in the material world for him to dismiss it out of hand. And what she said about Dyaus and the rest of the Elabonian pantheon put him in mind of his own thoughts… and his own worries. He wondered how much of the dream he would remember when he woke.

  "I'll take the chance," he said. "The Trokmoi brought their gods south of the Niffet when they crossed over it some years back, and those gods do live in this land now, but they haven't run off the gods we Elabonians follow. The Trokmoi haven't conquered us, either, you'll notice, as they surely would have if our gods were as weak as you say."

  "As I also told you, it's the Trokm- gods who are weak," Voldar answered. But she did not sound so grimly self-assured as she had before; maybe he'd given her a response she hadn't expected. She gathered herself before resuming, "In any case, my people and I are not puny and foolish, as are the Trokmoi and their gods. We do not come here to visit or to share. We come to take."

  As far as Gerin was concerned, the Trokmoi had come for the same reason. But the Gradi and Voldar and the rest of their gods were much more serious, much more methodical about it than the woodsrunners.

  Voldar went on, "I tell you this: if you stand against us, you and your line shall surely fail, and it will be as if you had never been. Be warned, and choose accordingly."

  For a moment, Gerin knew stark despair. Voldar had struck keenly at his deepest secret fear. Almost, he was tempted to give in. But then he remembered Biton's verses promising Ricolf's barony to Duren. Had the farseeing god been lying to him? He had trouble believing that. He wondered if Voldar had so much as sensed Biton's presence in the land, the Sibyl's shrine being far from anywhere the Gradi had reached and Biton himself being only superficially Elabonian. He did not ask. The more ignorant the Gradi and their gods remained of the northlands, the better off their opponents would be.

  He also wondered whether Voldar had yet encountered whatever older, utterly un-Elabonian powers dwelt under the Sibyl's shrine, the powers controlling the monsters. Then he wondered if there were any such powers. So much he didn't know, even after a busy lifetime in the world.

  "What is your answer?" Voldar demanded when he did not speak.

  "Who can say whether what you tell me is the same as what will be?" he replied. "I guess I'll take my chances fighting on."

  "Fool!" Voldar screamed. She stabbed out a finger at him. Cold smote, sharp and harsh as any spear thrust. He clutched at his chest, as if pierced-and woke up, panting, his heart pounding with fear, in the great hall of the keep he and his army had just seized.

  Adiatunnus was lying a few feet away. No sooner had Gerin's eyes flown open in the gloom of guttering torches than the Trokm- chieftain gave a great cry-"The hag! The horrible hag!" — in his own language and sat bolt upright, his pale eyes wide and staring.

  Several warriors muttered and stirred. A couple of men woke up at Adiatunnus' shout and complained before rolling over and going back to sleep. Adiatunnus gaped wildly, now this way, now that, as if he did not know where he was.

  "Did you just visit a certain goddess in your dreams?" Gerin called quietly. He still didn't know whether mentioning Voldar by name would help make her notice him, but, after what he'd just seen, he didn't want to find out, either.

  "Och, I did that," Adiatunnus answered, his voice shaky. He needed a moment to realize why Gerin was likely to be asking the question, a telling measure of how shaken he was. His gaze sharpened, showing his wits beginning to work once more. "And you, Fox? The same?"

  "The same," Gerin agreed. "She-whoever she was" — no, he'd take no chances- "tried to frighten me out of going on with the campaign. What happened to you?"

  "Just the look of her turned the marrow in me to ice for fair," Adiatunnus said, shivering. "Humliest wench I'm ever after seeing, and that's nobbut the truth. And the blood running from the jaws of her, it came from some good Trokm- god, I'm thinking, puir fellow."

  "Ugly? Blood? That's not how she showed herself to me," Gerin said, more intrigued than surprised. Gods were gods, after all; of course they could manifest themselves in more than one way. "She was beautiful but terrible, fear and cold and awe all mixed together. What I thought was, No wonder she's chief among all the Gradi gods."

  "We saw her different, that we did," Adiatunnus said with another shudder. "I wonder which was her true seeming, or if either one was. We'll never ken, I'm thinking. However you saw her, though, what did the two of you have to say to each other?"

  As best he could, Gerin recounted his conversation with the Gradi goddess, finishing, "When I told her I wouldn't give up, she-I don't know-flung a freeze at me. I thought my heart and all my blood would turn to ice, but before that happened, I woke up. What befell you?"

  "You said her nay?" Adiatunnus asked in wondering tones. "You said her nay, and she didn't destroy you?"

  "Of course she destroyed me," Gerin answered irritably. "Look-here you are, talking with my blasted corpse."

  Adiatunnus stared, then frowned, then, after a long moment, started to laugh. "Fox, it's many a time and oft I've wished to see the dead corp of you, blasted or any way you choose. The now, though, I'll own to being glad you're still here to give me more in the line of troubles."

  "I thank you for that in the same spirit you meant it," Gerin said, squeezing another chuckle out of Adiatunnus. The Fox went on, "What did… she… say or do to make you wake up with such a howl?"

  "Why, she showed me the ruin of everything I'd labored for all these years, if I was to go on with the war against her people," the Trokm- answered.

  "And you believed her?" Gerin said. "Just like that?"

  "So I did," Adiatunnus said with yet another chuckle. "What I want to know is, why you didna."

  "Because I assumed she was lying to me, to put me in fear and make me lose heart," Gerin said. "If I were a Gradi god, it's what I'd do. You Trokmoi are a tricksy folk-have you no trickster gods?"

  "Aye, we do that," Adiatunnus admitted. "But the goddess in my dream, now, she's not that sort, not from all the tales of her I ken, any road. And the Gradi, they're not that sort, either. They come and they take and they kill and they go, with hardly even a smile to say they're enjoying the work."

  That last phrase drew a snort from the Fox, who said, "Well, from what I've seen, you're right about the Gradi. You may even be right about… that goddess. Maybe she wouldn't lie for the sport of it, the way a woodsrunner would." He relished Adiatunnus' glare, a sign the chieftain's spirit was recovering. "But would she lie to help her own folk? Of course she would. This side of Biton, can you think of a god who wouldn't?"

  Adiatunnus pondered that. Slowly, he nodded. "Summat to what you say, lord prince." He used Gerin's title in a tone half grudging, half admiring. "You've got sand in you, that you do. You aim just to keep on after the Gradi as if you'd never dreamt your dream, do you now?"

  "We've
beaten them once, you and I together," Gerin said. "I've beaten them another time, all by my lonesome. Till they show me they can beat me, why should I pull back?"

  "Sure and you have a way to make it all sound so simple, so easy," Adiatunnus said. "But they're after beating us a whole raft o' times-us Trokmoi, I mean. When that happens" — he sighed- "the only thing you can think of is that it'll happen again, try as you will to stop it."

  "Which is why you made common cause with us," Gerin observed.

  "Truth there," Adiatunnus said.

  "Then let me take the lead, since you gave it to me, and don't trouble your head with dreams, even dreams with goddesses in them," the Fox said.

  "Dinna fash yoursel'. Dinna fash yoursel'." Adiatunnus made his voice high and squeaky, as if he were a mother shouting at a little boy. "Easy to say. Not so easy to do, not when you're in the middle o' the dream."

  There was truth in that, too. But Gerin asked, "Are you dreaming now?"

  "No," the Trokm- chieftain said at once. But then he looked around the dim-lit great hall. "Or no is what I think, the now. But how can you be sure?"

  "Good question," Gerin said. "If I had a good answer, I'd give it to you. I'll tell you this much: I don't think I'm dreaming, either." He pulled his blanket up around him; the rough wool scratched at his neck. "With any luck, though, I will be soon." He closed his eyes. He heard Adiatunnus laugh softly and, a little later, heard his snores join those filling the hall. A little later than that, he stopped hearing anything.

  * * *

  When the Fox's army rode west from the captured keep the next morning, they rode toward dark gray clouds piled high on the horizon and scudding rapidly toward them on a startlingly nippy breeze. "Wouldn't know we were at the summer season, would you?" Gerin said, shivering a little as that wind slid under his armor and chilled his hide.

  Duren looked back over his shoulder at his father. "If I didn't know what season it was, I'd guess those clouds held snow in them, not rain."

  "I wish they did," Van said, peering ahead with a frown. "Snow'd leave the road hard. Rain like the rain those clouds look to have in 'em'll turn these dirt tracks into hub-deep soup." He turned from Duren to Gerin. "Your Elabonian Emperors were no fools when they made their fine highways. Hard on a horse's hooves, aye, but you can move along 'em and bite the thumb at the worst of the weather."

  "I won't say you're wrong, because I think you're right." Gerin studied those fast-moving clouds and shook his head. "I've never seen weather so ugly this late in the year."

  Even as he spoke, the wind freshened further. It smelled of rain, of damp dust somewhere not far away. A moment later, the first drop hit him in the face. More rain followed, the wind blowing it almost horizontally through the air. Rain in summer should have been pleasant, breaking the humidity and leaving the air mild and sweet when it was gone. This rain, once arrived, chilled to the marrow and gave no sign it would ever leave.

  A few of the warriors had brought rain capes with them, of oiled cloth or leather. For once, Gerin found himself imperfectly forethoughtful and getting ever more perfectly wet. The horses splashed through the thickening ooze of the roadway and began to kick up muck instead of dust. The chariot wheels churned up a muddy wake as the car rolled west.

  Gerin's world contracted; the rain brought down dim curtains that hid the middle distance and even the near. He could see the couple of teams and chariots closest to him, no more. Every Gradi in the world might have been gathered a bowshot and a half off to one side of the road, and he would never have known it. After a while, he stopped worrying; had the Gradi been there, they wouldn't have known about him, either.

  Water dripped from Van's eyebrows and trickled through his beard. "This is no natural storm, Fox," he boomed, raising his voice to make himself heard through wailing wind and drumming drops.

  "I fear you're right," Gerin said. "It puts me in mind of the one Balamung the wizard raised against us before he led the Trokmoi across the Niffet." He remembered the gleaming, sorcerous bridge over the river as if it had been yesterday, though more than a third of his life had passed since then.

  Van nodded. The motion shook more water from his beard. "And if a wizard could do what Balamung did, how hard a grip can gods take on the weather?"

  "A good question," Gerin answered, and then said no more for some time. A lot of people had been coming up with good questions lately. At last, he added, "It's such a good one, I wish you hadn't asked it."

  As if to give point to what the outlander had said, a lightning bolt crashed down and smashed a tree somewhere not far away. Gerin saw the blue-purple glare and heard the crash, but could not see the tree through the driving rain.

  As the rain went on, the army traveled more and more slowly. The Fox had trouble being sure they were still traveling west. He had trouble being sure they were still on the road; the only way to tell it from the fields through which it went was that the mud seemed deeper and more clinging in the roadway.

  Days were long at this season of the year, but the clouds were so thick and black, they disguised the coming of night almost till true darkness arrived. The army, caught away from a keep and even away from a peasant village, made a hasty, miserable camp. The only offering they could give the ghosts was blood sausage from their rations. Starting fires was out of the question. So was hunting.

  Gerin set his jaw against the discontented, disappointed wails of the night spirits and did his best to ignore them, as he would have tried to ignore the first twinges of a tooth beginning to rot in his head. He squelched around the unhappy encampment. There were tents enough for only about a third of his men. He shouted and cajoled troopers into packing those tents as tight as serfs stuffed barley into storage jars. That helped, but it wasn't enough. Nothing would have been enough, not in that rain.

  He got the men who could not be stuffed into tents to rig what shelters they could with blankets and with the chariots they'd been riding. Such would have done against the usual warm summer rain. Against this- "Half of us will be down with chest fever in a couple of days," he said, shivering. "I wouldn't be surprised if we got sleet."

  "I'd sooner fight the Gradi than the weather, any day," Van said. "Against the Gradi, you can hit back." Glumly, Gerin nodded.

  Adiatunnus called, "Fox, where are you the now? With the murk so thick and all, I'm liable to fall in a puddle and drown myself or ever I find you."

  "Here," Gerin answered through the hiss of the rain. He spoke again a moment later, to guide the Trokm- chieftain to the blanket under which he huddled. Adiatunnus sat down beside him with a series of soft splashes.

  "Lord prince, can we go on in-and against-this?" the woodsrunner asked.

  "I aim to try," Gerin answered.

  "But what's the use?" Adiatunnus wailed. "If we go on, we'll drown for fair, unless you're after reckoning death from sinking in the muck a different thing nor drowning."

  "There's a question over which I suspect the philosophers have never vexed themselves," Gerin said, thereby amusing himself but not the Trokm-. He went on, "And what if we give up and the sun comes out before noon tomorrow? This is a bad storm, aye, but not so bad as all that." That he'd been saying just the opposite to Van a little while before fazed him not at all; he wanted to keep Adiatunnus' spirits as high as he could.

  That proved not to be very high. With a sigh, the chieftain said, "One way or another, they'll overmaster us. If they canna be doing it by force of arms, that goddess and the rest will manage. We're better for having you here, Fox, but is better good enough? I doubt it, that I do."

  Gerin fell back to the last ditch: "Do you remember your oath?"

  "Och, that I do." Adiatunnus sighed again. "While you go on, lord prince, I'll go with you, indeed and I will. So I swore. But whether I think 'twill do any good-there's another story." He splashed away, leaving Gerin without any good reply.

  * * *

  Spurred largely by the Fox's shouts and curses, the Elabonians and Trokmoi did
fare west again after dark gave way to a grudging, halfhearted morning twilight. Riding straight into the teeth of the rain only made things worse. So did the miserable breakfasts the troopers choked down, the slow pace the mud forced, and the out-of-season cold of the rain.

  Toward midmorning, little bits of ice began to sting the soldiers' faces. "Not so bad as all that, you say?" Adiatunnus shouted through the slush after his chariot plowed forward to come up level with Gerin's. Again, the Fox found none of his usual sharp comebacks.

  A little later, the army came up to a peasant village. The serfs were frantic. "The crops will die in the fields!" they screamed, as if Gerin could do something about that. "We'll starve come winter if we don't drown first-or freeze to death. Ice in summer!"

  "Everything will be all right," Gerin said. He wondered if even the most naive serf would believe him.

  As he and his men slogged on, he looked back enviously at the thatch-roofed huts in which the peasants huddled. They would undoubtedly keep drier than his army. Had the village been large rather than small, he would have been tempted to turn the serfs out of their homes and appropriate the shelters for his men. He was glad he didn't have to worry about that.

  The farther west he and his troopers went, the worse the weather got. Somewhere, the Gradi were waiting. He hoped they were as wet and miserable as his own men.

  Duren said, "At this rate, we could drive straight into the Orynian Ocean and we'd never know it. I don't see how we could get any wetter than we are now."

  "Oceans taste of salt, lad," Van said. "I've been on 'em and in 'em, so I know. Past that, though, you're right. I keep expecting to see fish swim by me. Haven't yet, so maybe this is still land."