Tale of the Fox gtf-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "— Mornings spent wishing you were dead," Gerin broke in. Rihwin looked indignant. With his flexible features, every expression he assumed was, in a small way, a work of art. Gerin took no notice of him, but pressed ahead: "All you remember about wine is the parts of the drinking of it you enjoyed. The parts that weren't so much fun, you forget."

  Rihwin shook his head. "There was," he insisted, "nothing about drinking wine that failed of enjoyment for me. I was a connoisseur." He struck a pose of exaggerated estheticism that would have made Mavrix proud.

  "Fanciest word for drunk I ever heard," Van said.

  Rihwin looked indignant all over again, giving a rendering full of even more virtuosity than the previous one. Before he could protest out loud, though, Gerin spoke up in agreement with the outlander: "You weren't much of a connoisseur the day we met you down in that horrible dive in the City of Elabon, the one not far from the Sorcerers' Collegium. What you were was somebody trying to climb into a wine jar through the little hole in the neck, and you didn't care a lick about the vintage you were drinking."

  "After all these years, I must confess to remembering little about the occasion," Rihwin said with dignity.

  "Yes, passing out will do that to you, won't it?" Gerin replied.

  "You were as cold as a carp on a snowbank," Van added.

  "If you grand and magnificent gentlemen, who of a certainty have been sober every moment of every day of your lives, insist on reviling me and casting imputations upon my character, I shall be forced to take myself off and drown my sorrows-in ale, worse luck." Rihwin marched away, nose in the air.

  Behind him, Gerin and Van both started to laugh. "There's nothing we can do with him," Gerin said, and his voice held only admiration. "Not a single thing."

  "How about a good swift kick in the arse?" Van suggested.

  "If all the knocks Rihwin's taken over the years haven't let in any sense, one more kick won't do the job," Gerin said, and Van laughed again. Nonetheless, Gerin kept a thoughtful eye on Rihwin the Fox. When Rihwin got particularly vehement on the subject of wine, strange things had a way of happening. Gerin didn't want strange things to start happening. Life, at the moment, was quite complicated enough without them. Unfortunately, he had not the slightest idea what he could to do prevent them.

  * * *

  Most of Aragis' warriors were down in the southern part of his lands, keeping an eye on the forces of the Elabonian Empire. Even so, more detachments joined the army the Fox was leading. Aragis' peasants and villagers might have had their troubles, but his kingdom did seem to support an astonishing number of soldiers, every one of them well armed, well equipped, and to all appearances a rugged customer.

  "I would have put even more men into the south against the Empire," Aragis remarked to Gerin when yet another contingent of his warriors came rattling up in their chariots to join the army, "but I had to hold a good many back to fight you in case you decided to jump on me and then worry about the Empire."

  "To the five hells with me if you don't have enough fighting men to tackle two big wars at once," Gerin said.

  "If your Trokm- neighbor had decided to forget he was your vassal, you wouldn't have brought so many of your own troopers down to Balser's holding." Aragis spoke with as much certainty as if he'd announced that Math moved through the sky more slowly than Tiwaz.

  Since he was right, Gerin changed the subject: "Who's commanding the force you've got facing the Empire?"

  "My eldest son, Aranast, with Marlanz Raw-Meat to hold him steady should he falter," Aragis answered. "Aranast has never tried leading that big an army before. If he's up to it, well and good. If he's not, I don't aim to let him throw away the kingdom."

  "That's sensible," Gerin agreed, though he wondered how happy Aranast was at having Marlanz looking over his shoulder. Then something else occurred to him: "The first time you sent Marlanz up to treat with me, you had an older man with him, too, to hold him to the road if he tried wandering off."

  "You have your son with you here," Aragis said, nodding to Dagref. "One day, he'll lead men on his own. For now, he's still learning."

  Gerin nodded, but still thought the two principles not quite the same. Dagref plainly lacked the experience he needed to lead now. In a while, he would as plainly have it. Aragis seemed to make a habit of using a man with such experience alongside one who was just on the edge of having it. The idea was a long way from the worst one Gerin had ever met.

  That evening, as the steadily growing army was encamping by the side of the Elabon Way, a chariot came pounding up the highway, wheels clattering on stone paving, the driver whipping on the horses to wring every last drip of speed from them.

  The fellow in the car with him sprang down as soon as the chariot halted. "Lord king-" he gasped, and then paused for a moment to catch his breath. He was swaying a little; if he'd come a long way in a chariot going hells for leather, solid ground probably felt unsteady under his feet. Gerin came over to hear what he had to say. Aragis frowned at that, but said nothing. The messenger resumed: "Lord king, uh, lord kings, there's an imperial coming behind me. You'll meet him on the road tomorrow, I've no doubt, but I can tell you what he's going to say."

  "Good," Aragis said briskly, and Gerin nodded. "Say on, Sandifer." The Archer glanced at the Fox and shrugged a small shrug, acknowledging that this business concerned both of them.

  Sandifer said, "Lord, uh, kings, he's going to give you ten days to disperse your forces, or else there will be war: voluminous war, I heard him say, whatever that means."

  "It means he talks like a southerner," Gerin said. "They like to throw in a fancy word every now and then, whether they use it the right way or not."

  "I heard that," Rihwin called.

  "If they want volumes of war," Aragis said, ignoring Rihwin (as did Gerin), "we'll give them enough to fill the Fox's library."

  That wasn't using voluminous the right way, either, but Gerin was not inclined to undertake literary criticism on his fellow king's utterances. "If it comes to war-no, when it comes to war," he said, "do you aim to go back into your keeps and make the Empire dig you out one castle at a time?"

  "Only if I have to," Aragis answered at once. "If I were fighting the imperials alone, I might do that, for they'd have far more strength than I do by myself. But they'd ravage the countryside, so that even beating them back now might mean losing to you next year. My lands shield yours here, you'll notice."

  "That's what you get for living south of me." Gerin scratched his head. Aragis could see that having the Elabonian Empire devastate his territory would weaken him to the point where he'd have trouble withstanding the Fox. He wasn't stupid, nor anything close to it. But the idea that he was doing to his own lands over the course of years what the Empire would do in a single campaigning season had never entered his mind. It wasn't immediately apparent, and so wasn't there at all for him.

  The Archer said, "With you beside me, Fox, I aim to fight those imperial bastards as hard as I can and as far south as I can. One thing I will say about you: now that you've said you will fight alongside me, I don't think you'll turn on me instead of the Empire. There are others in the northlands to whom I'd not trust my back."

  Gerin bowed slightly. When it came to judging how things ran in the short term, Aragis was as good as anyone he'd ever know-as good as he was, probably. Could he trust Aragis at his back? The only answer he could come up with was… sometimes. He said, "Knowing which enemy to pick counts for a good deal."

  "Oh, indeed." Aragis bared his teeth in one of his alarming smiles. "Did I not rely on you to understand the Elabonian Empire was more dangerous to both of us than we are to each other? Did I not put my life in your hands on that understanding and no more?"

  "You did." Gerin wondered whether he would have done that in reverse if, say, the Gradi had been on the point of beating him five years earlier. Maybe. Maybe not, too. Because Aragis lived so close to the here-and-now, every crisis was liable to seem a matter of life and de
ath to him. Gerin was better at waiting than his hard-charging fellow king.

  "We cast defiance in the envoy's teeth, then, and smash the Empire's army on the battlefield." Aragis' eyes had a fierce falcon's glint in them, too. He believed every word of what he was saying. Maybe that would help him make his belief real. Maybe it would make him try to do more than he really could. Gerin shrugged. He'd find out soon.

  * * *

  When the chariot bearing the envoy of the Elabonian Empire and those in which his retinue rode came into view, Gerin felt-not for the first time since leaving Fox Keep-he'd fallen back in time through close to half his life. Not since his last trip down to the City of Elabon, more than twenty years before, had he seen men dressed in the flowing robes the imperials south of the High Kirs affected.

  Adiatunnus saw them, too, and did not know what to make of them. "Is the Empire after sending women to treat with us the now?" he asked, not quite in jest.

  "No, that's just their style down there," the Fox answered. "And they shave not only their cheeks and chins, the way you Trokmoi do, but their upper lips as well. I did it myself, when I lived down in the city."

  "But you had the sense to go back to a better way," Adiatunnus said.

  Gerin shrugged. "Sometimes different is just different, not better or worse."

  He looked around for Ferdulf. When he spied the little demigod, he waved for him to come over. Ferdulf came, looking suspicious. More often than not, Gerin was doing his best to make him go away. "What do you want?" Ferdulf growled.

  "See those fellows up ahead?" The Fox pointed. "That's the envoy from the Elabonian Empire and his friends."

  Ferdulf's lip curled in splendid scorn. "So? What do you want me to do about it? Miserable imperial-" His voice faded down into a scatological mumble.

  That was just what Gerin wanted. "They probably won't like you any better," he said with a grin he did not show: Ferdulf seemed to have forgotten he too was an Elabonian. "They're the ones who hold down Sithonia, after all."

  "I wonder what I can do to them," Ferdulf mused. Dagref looked back over his shoulder at Gerin. Gerin wished he hadn't done it; the look might have alerted Ferdulf to the notion that he was being manipulated. If Dagref did have to give Gerin a look, though, a look of approval was the one the Fox wanted. Dagref, as his father had learned to his own discomfiture, was better than anyone else at manipulating Ferdulf.

  Up came the Elabonian chariots. The one in the lead had a shield painted in green and white stripes mounted on the pole between the two horses: a shield of truce. That chariot and the one behind it pulled away from the rest and approached the army that had set out from Fox Keep. "I am Efilnath the Earnest," the fellow in the fanciest robe called, "commissioner to his majesty Crebbig I, Emperor of Elabon. I see here Aragis the Archer, who presumes to make the error of styling himself king. Rumor has it that others in the province are equally rash. Be any such others present, that I might treat with and dismiss all such false claimants simultaneously?"

  "I am Gerin the Fox," Gerin announced, "king of the north. I am here in alliance with Aragis. I note, Efilnath, that if you call claims false and say ahead of time you will dismiss them, you are not treating with those who make them, only disposing of them. I also note that they-and we-are not to be disposed of so readily."

  He wondered who Crebbig I was. On his last journey down to the City of Elabon, Hildor III had reigned there: an indolent excuse for a monarch. Whatever Crebbig's faults-and, being a man, he was bound to have them-indolence did not seem to be among their number.

  "As the Elabonian Empire does not recognize that this land has ever been anything but an imperial province, so naturally we cannot recognize any men styling themselves kings, save in recognizing them as rebels and traitors," Efilnath said.

  Aragis the Archer growled something angry under his breath. Gerin was about to growl something out loud when his eye chanced to fall on one of the men in the chariot behind Efilnath's. The fellow was nothing special to look at-not too tall, not too wide, not too handsome-and wore a robe that would have been altogether ordinary in the City of Elabon. Nonetheless, perhaps by the way he carried himself, perhaps by a certain look in his eye, Gerin knew him for what he was: a wizard from the Sorcerers' Collegium.

  And he recognized Gerin, too-not as an equal, as one who had completed the same arduous training, but as one who had some part of it. Those oddly compelling eyes of his widened, just a little; plainly, he had not expected to come across anyone in the northlands who shared even a fragment of his arcane expertise. Gerin understood that. The Elabonians south of the High Kirs reckoned the northlands a barbarous backwater. He knew they had a point, but not so much of one as they thought they did.

  He smiled at the wizard, a bleak display of acknowledgment and warning. The Elabonian got down from his chariot and hurried over to Efilnath's. He whispered in the envoy's ear. Whatever he said-and the Fox had a pretty good notion of what it would be-Efilnath seemed unimpressed. "Come what may, a backwoods baron remains a backwoods baron," he said, a distinct sniff in his voice.

  "Oh, Ferdulf," Gerin called sweetly, "come and say hello to these nice people, would you please?"

  "What nice people?" Ferdulf snarled. "All I see is a bunch of Elabonians who think they're smarter than they really are-idiots who think they're halfwits."

  As if his rumbling baritone wouldn't have been enough to alert the southerners that he was something out of the ordinary, he also strolled along a couple of feet off the ground. Efilnath gaped at him. So did the wizard, in a different, more intensely concentrated way. "Who are you?" he demanded, and then, a moment later, "What are you?"

  By way of reply, Ferdulf stuck out his tongue. It went out improbably far. The tip wiggled like a serpent's tongue for a moment. Then he drew the whole thing back in with a wet plop. He smiled unpleasantly at the Elabonian sorcerer.

  Sweetly still, Gerin said, "Lord Efilnath, lord wizard-"

  "Call me Caffer," the wizard said. As the Fox knew, it was not his real name. Wizards warded those, to keep enemies from working magic with them.

  "Lord Efilnath, lord Caffer, then," Gerin resumed, "allow me to present you to Ferdulf, the son of Mavrix, who, when he is not accompanying me, dwells in the village by Fox Keep."

  "A son of the lord of the sweet grape, here?" Efilnath exclaimed. "Impossible!"

  "Not impossible," Caffer said. "It is truth." He and the Elabonian envoy conferred again, more urgently this time.

  Gerin hoped the idea that Ferdulf was at least in some measure under his control would get through to the imperials. Ferdulf didn't help, remarking, "And a bloody boring hole that village is, too."

  "Yield to the Empire's might, pay the tribute long owed us, and all shall be forgiven concerning these usurpations of authority you have perpetrated," Efilnath said with what he obviously thought was true generosity. "Return to your own barony, abandon any false claims to suzerainty over your neighbors, and live under the beneficent splendor of Crebbig, justly styled the Magnificent."

  "Pay twenty years' tribute?" Gerin shook his head. "Not likely, not when the Elabonian Empire wasn't here for a day of that time."

  "Twenty years' tribute, yes," Efilnath said, "plus whatever you may have owed prior to that time. Our records indicate that you northern barons were shockingly lax in paying your dues even before such time as we temporarily fell out of touch with you."

  "That's a nice way to put it," Gerin said. "Before you forgot all about us, you mean. Before you left us to the tender mercy of the Trokmoi, you mean. Before you weren't here to help us fight the monsters or the Gradi, you mean. And if you go away again now, you'll expect us to pay you again for being gone, won't you?"

  Ignoring the sarcasm, Efilnath said, "You did not, as I have noted, contribute your fair share before we temporarily fell out of touch with you."

  With a shrug, Gerin answered, "It all depends on how you look at things. I never saw any imperial soldiers on the Niffet helping me hold the
Trokmoi at bay. If the crops failed, I never saw any grain hauled up from south of the High Kirs to help us. I don't know about you, Efilnath, or about your Emperor Crebbig, either, but I'm not in the habit of paying for what I don't see."

  "Crebbig is your Emperor as well as mine." Efilnath sounded shocked-artfully shocked-that Gerin could imagine otherwise.

  Caffer broke in: "Speak to me of the Gradi, lord baron. South of the High Kirs, we know less of them than we would like."

  "The Fox's style is lord king, even as is mine," Aragis said. "Best you remember it, lest he take your rudeness to heart and avenge himself on you."

  Aragis was likelier than Gerin to do something like that. Gerin started to say he wasn't offended, but then checked himself. Why not give the imperials something else to worry about? He laughed scornfully instead. "I'll answer," he said. "They think they can rule this province, and they don't even know who lives in it."

  "They temporarily fell out of touch, that's all," Dagref said. He struck the perfect tone. It wasn't even scorn. It said the Empire's envoy and wizard didn't rate scorn, only amused disdain.

  It struck home, too. In a voice less suave than he had used before, Efilnath demanded, "Lord baron, will you then yield to the authority of the Emperor Crebbig and beg his forgiveness for the autonomy you have usurped?"

  "In a word, no," Gerin answered. "This would look to be a word you people don't know well, since your comrade heard it from Aragis without listening to it."

  Ferdulf's yawn was as extravagant and as anatomically unlikely as the distance to which he'd stuck out his tongue. "Go away, you foolish people," he said. "You only prove how dull Elabonians can be." And then, without warning, all the gentleness disappeared from his mockery. "Begone. Get out of this land. You have no right to it. I, a god's son, so declare."

  Efilnath flinched. Gerin would have flinched, too, had an angry demigod growled at him. But the Empire's envoy was not without spirit. "The gods of Elabon say otherwise, and I serve them and the Emperor."