Tale of the Fox gtf-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "Arrow," she said, doing her best to make light of it. "The king says it should heal well."

  "Through the meat of the calf," Gerin said when Van looked a query his way. "No tendon cut-I'm sure of that. She should heal clean." The gods willing, he added to himself. Maybe saying it over and over would help make the gods more willing.

  Van was still looking at him, not with a question in his eyes any longer but with rising anger. Gerin had seen him aim that look at scores, likely hundreds, of enemies over the years. The Fox had never had it aimed at him. Run went through his mind, as it was no doubt meant to do. Van growled, "If it hadn't been for you, Fox-"

  That Gerin had had the identical thought would have done little to console the outlander. Gerin was sure of it. But, before Van could say anything more, Maeva broke in sharply: "Leave him be, Father. How old were you when you took your first wound?"

  "Sixteen or so," Van answered. "I was lucky for a while. I've made up for it since." That was, if anything, an understatement. He bore a great many scars. Gerin wondered how he'd ever survived one wound that had gashed his chest and belly.

  "Well, then," Maeva said, as if that said everything that needed saying.

  But Van shook his head. "It's not the same, chick," he said: the same thought that had been troubling the Fox.

  "Why not?" Maeva said. "I fought well enough-oh, maybe not so well as you, Father, because I'm not the size you are, even though I'm not small. I kept fighting after I got hurt, too; it wasn't bad enough to make me quit the field."

  "What am I supposed to do?" Van sounded plaintive, something he very rarely did. He looked to Gerin. "Curse it, Fox, help me. She sounds like I did when I was the same age."

  "And why are you so surprised at that?" Gerin asked. "She's your daughter, after all. Dagref sounds more like me than I ever thought anyone could. He sounds more like me than I ever thought anyone would want to."

  "Oh, aye, I can see that," Van said. Gerin laughed. Dagref, perhaps fortunately, was nowhere nearby. Van went on, "But it's not the same." He'd said that before, and sounded most sincere. He still did. "Dagref's your son. Of course he'll follow in your track."

  "Am I not your child because I have no stones?" Maeva asked.

  Before Van could answer, Gerin said, "I've seen men with beards down to their belts who had less in the way of stones than you do, Maeva."

  "Thank you, lord king," she said quietly.

  Van glared at Gerin. "Fat lot of help you are," he growled, and stomped off shaking his head.

  "Thank you, lord king," Maeva said again, more firmly this time. "I think you're a great deal of help."

  "I know you do," Gerin answered. "The trouble is, I still don't know whether I'm supposed to be helping you or your father." He gave her a sudden, sharp bow. "And I have other wounded to help. If I am supposed to treat you like a soldier-and I'm still a long way from sure that I am-then I have to go on, as I would from another soldier."

  "Why, of course, lord king," she said, as if surprised he could imagine thinking any other way. That surprised him in turn, and made him begin to believe he might in fact be able to think of her as a soldier.

  * * *

  Gerin sat up on his blanket. "Something's wrong," he said, his voice blurry with sleep. He looked around. The campfires were lower than they had been, though sentries still fed them to help hold the night ghosts at bay-not that the ghosts hadn't had their glut of blood earlier that day. Snores rose from sleeping soldiers in an unmelodious chorus. Injured men groaned against their pain.

  Everything seemed to be as it should. But Gerin had not been dreaming when he thought something was wrong; he was sure of that. He did not know how he was sure, only that he was. He looked around again. Again, he could find nothing amiss.

  He started to lie down once more, then checked himself. He looked around yet again, this time for Rihwin the Fox. Wherever there was trouble, Rihwin usually wasn't far away. That was especially true when wine was involved. Gerin hadn't had to worry about wine for a good many years. Now he did. Worrying about wine meant worrying about Rihwin.

  But no: there Rihwin lay, not twenty feet off, snoring as unmusically as anyone else. Gerin let out a small sigh of relief. If Rihwin had no part in whatever trouble brewed, odds were it wouldn't be so bad. Years of experience had led Gerin to believe as much, at any rate.

  He yawned and lay flat again. Despite the yawn, despite Rihwin's snores, sleep would not come. "Something's wrong," he said again, quietly this time, and got to his feet. He would not find any rest till he made sure that prickly feeling of unease in his mind was imagination and nerves.

  He breathed a little easier when he saw Dagref, too. Dagref probably would not make trouble on his own. He knew precisely what sort of trouble Dagref and Maeva would make together, though. He would not have wanted to make that sort of trouble while wounded, but, with both of them so young, who could tell what they were liable to do? But they couldn't very well do anything with Dagref sprawled asleep on a blanket.

  A sentry was laying branches on a fire. He looked up when he heard Gerin's footsteps. "Is everything all right, lord king?" he asked.

  "I don't know," Gerin answered. "I'm trying to find out." He prowled on.

  Lengyel the wizard was liable to cause trouble, too. Lengyel had already caused trouble, as a matter of fact. Gerin stalked over to where he stayed under guard. The guards were alert. So was Gerin, when he saw that Lengyel, instead of lying there asleep, was sitting up looking at him.

  "No, lord king, he hasn't done anything," one of the wizard's guards assured the Fox. "He wakes up in the night sometimes-has to piss, you know. He's often a goodish while dropping off afterwards."

  "Is he?" Gerin gave Lengyel a hard stare. "Probably looking for another chance to get away."

  "If I found one, I should be a fool not to take it," the sorcerer said. "I regret to admit I have not found it. Your men have been more careful than I had expected." He made a sour face. "Very little on this side of the High Kirs has been as I expected."

  "We never expected to see imperials on this side of the High Kirs at all," Gerin said. "We'd have been just as happy if you people had gone on minding your own business, too, instead of poking your snouts into ours."

  Even as he spoke, he wondered if he was telling the truth. If the imperial army had stayed south of the mountains, he would have been fighting Aragis instead. By what the men of the Elabonian Empire had shown thus far, the Archer would have made a more troublesome foe. On the other hand, Gerin had no guarantee that the Elabonian Emperor wouldn't send another army over the High Kirs to give this one a hand.

  In musing tones, he said, "Tell me what this Crebbig I is like." He chuckled into the darkness, thinking how much he sounded like the imperials asking him about Ferdulf.

  "His imperial majesty is bold and valiant and splendid and terrible, beloved of his friends, a terror to his enemies-"

  "Wait." Gerin held up a hand. Lengyel sounded as if he could go on like that for days without ever saying anything that mattered. Gerin said, "Let's try it another way: is Crebbig Hildor's son? If he's not, what was he before his backside landed on the throne down there in the City of Elabon?"

  "How could you not know these things?" Lengyel asked in surprise.

  "No trouble at all," the Fox answered. "Very much the same way as you were ignorant about everything that has anything to do with the northlands. The difference is, I know that I don't know, where you hadn't a clue."

  That drew an indignant sniff from Lengyel; wizards, knowing so much about wizardry, naturally assumed they knew a lot about everything else, too. Primly, the sorcerer said, "You exaggerate, I assure you."

  "No, I don't." Gerin held up a hand. "Wait. Never mind. It doesn't matter. Just answer my questions about Crebbig."

  "Very well." Lengyel did not and would not call him lord king, holding to the official imperial view that there were no kings north of the High Kirs, only rebels ruling against the authority of the City of
Elabon. The wizard went on, "No, Crebbig is not the son of the Emperor Hildor III, who is now beloved among the gods."

  "Dead, you mean," Gerin said, and Lengyel nodded. The Fox asked, "Did Crebbig give him some timely help in becoming beloved among the gods?" Lengyel nodded again. This time, so did Gerin. "Good. Now we're getting somewhere. What was the murderous usurper doing before he slaughtered his way to the top of the heap?"

  "I resent the imputation contained within your words," Lengyel said.

  "I don't care," Gerin said cheerfully. "Resent all you like. You serve him. I don't, and I won't. Now answer my question: what was Crebbig the Killer doing before he got to be Elabonian Emperor?"

  Lengyel gave him another reproving look for that highly unofficial ekename. He ignored it. He was good at ignoring such looks, having had practice with his children. Seeing it fail, Lengyel said, "The Emperor was formerly commander of the Elabonian garrison occupying the city-states of Sithonia."

  "Was he?" Gerin said. "Now, isn't that interesting?" Crebbig would have had a good-sized army behind him when he rebelled; Elabon kept a large garrison in Sithonia for the good and sufficient reason that Elabon needed a large garrison in Sithonia. Down through the centuries of Elabonian occupation, the Sithonians had never given up plotting and scheming and conniving and occasionally rising up against their imperial overlords-and, being Sithonians, had never given up betraying one another to their imperial overlords, either.

  It was also interesting, the Fox realized a moment later, because of the Sithonian connections in his own life. He hadn't actually seen a man from one of the city-states east of the Greater Inner Sea since he'd come back from the City of Elabon more than twenty years before, but since then he'd had more dealings with Mavrix than he'd ever wanted, and Mavrix had saddled him with Ferdulf, and…

  "Father Dyaus," he whispered, and left Lengyel so quickly, the wizard and the guards all stared after him. He didn't care. Something was indeed liable to be wrong, and he thought he finally knew what sort of something, too.

  His nostrils twitched when he got close to where he was going. He hadn't smelled that smell in a long time, but he knew what it was. Rich, fruity… He couldn't have mistaken it for anything else.

  Guards stood around the wine Rihwin the Fox had captured from the imperials, as guards had stood around Lengyel. The wizard's guards hadn't been able to keep him from escaping once, and the guards here hadn't been able to keep somebody from getting into the wine. Gerin's nose told him as much, though the guards didn't seem to notice anything out of the ordinary. "Hello, lord king," one of them greeted him. "What brings you here?"

  "Trouble." Gerin pointed. "Don't you see, someone's got past you and in among the wineskins? Can't you smell the spilled blood of the sweet grape?"

  Once he showed them they had been befooled, they exclaimed angrily and snatched out their swords. Before then, they'd been oblivious. "Curse the imperial wizard to the hottest of the five hells," said the fellow who'd greeted Gerin. "His spells must have stolen our wits away."

  "That's not Lengyel in there." Gerin frowned. "All things considered, I rather wish it were."

  Ferdulf looked up from the wine he'd been drinking. "Bother!" he said, glaring at the Fox. "Why didn't my glamour take you, too?"

  "It's always harder if someone already knows what he's looking for," Gerin said. "Do you know what you're looking for, there with the wine?"

  "My father," Ferdulf said.

  "I thought we'd agreed that wasn't a good idea," Gerin told him.

  "Aye, we did," Ferdulf, that most unchildlike baritone still as clear as if he'd never begun to drink. "And then I stopped agreeing, and I decided to do something about not agreeing."

  "What you should have done was come to me," Gerin said. "You didn't agree by yourself. You shouldn't have broken the agreement by yourself, either."

  Ferdulf shrugged. "It takes two to make an agreement, but only one to be rid of it. You'd have tried to talk me out of this, and-"

  "You'd best believe I would," Gerin broke in. Mavrix was the last person-force, god-the Fox wanted to see right now. No one, not Gerin, not Ferdulf, probably not Mavrix himself, could begin to guess what he'd do.

  "But I don't want to be talked out of it," Ferdulf said. "The more I thought about that, the more certain I got. And so…" He raised a drinking jack to his lips. His throat worked. "That's very fine." It was sure to be only rough army wine, barely worth drinking, but he cared nothing for objectivity. "My father certainly made something better here than boring old ale."

  "Ale suits me well enough," Gerin answered sincerely, "though I would be the last to deny wine is fine, too. I've drunk a deal of wine, and drunk it with enjoyment." The last thing he wanted to do was offend Mavrix, if by some mischance the god should be listening and choose to manifest himself here.

  He succeeded in offending Ferdulf instead. "Trimmer!" the little demigod sneered, drinking again. "This is good, but that isn't bad-bah! You haven't much time, mortal man. You should be all one thing or all another, not a bit of this and a bit of that."

  Gerin shook his head. "I have something of everything in me. If I left something out, that would be the waste."

  Ferdulf stared at him. The demigod's eyes caught and reflected what little light there was like a cat's. "You don't answer as you should," he complained. "You don't think as you should. As best I can tell, my father put me on earth where he did for no better reason than to have you torment me."

  "I doubt that." Gerin had always thought Mavrix had sired Ferdulf on Fulda for no better reason than to torment him. If Ferdulf hadn't drawn the same conclusion, Gerin didn't intend to point it out to him. Life with the demigod had proved interesting enough as things were.

  For his part, Ferdulf was not thinking about about his relationship with the Fox. "I want my father!" he shouted, loud enough that the cry should have awakened the entire camp-but only Gerin and the guards around the wine seemed to hear him. "I want my father!" He poured wine down his throat from a skin almost as large as he was.

  Alarm prickled through Gerin. "Don't do that," he said urgently. "Come on, Ferdulf, give me the skin."

  "I want my father!" Ferdulf shouted again.

  The space around the wineskins seemed to… expand. "My son, I am here," Mavrix said.

  VII

  "Father!" Ferdulf cried in delight.

  Gerin trotted out his halting Sithonian: "I greet you, lord of the sweet grape." He bowed low, looking at the Sithonian god of wine and fertility from under his eyelids.

  Mavrix, as usual, wore supple fawnskin. A wreath of grape leaves kept his long, dark hair off his forehead. Ferdulf's eyes had flashed; Mavrix glowed all over, raiment and all. The only darkness in him was his eyes, twin pits of deepest shadow in his effeminately handsome face.

  "Well," he said now, voice echoing inside Gerin's head as if the Fox heard him with mind rather than with ears, "I have not been north of the mountains in some little while. I cannot say this benighted excuse for a country has improved much since I last saw it, I must tell you."

  "What do you mean?" Now Ferdulf sounded indignant. "I'm here, and I wasn't the last time you came to Fox Keep."

  "Well, yes," Mavrix admitted. He seemed something less than delighted to make his son's acquaintance. "Even so-"

  "The Gradi don't trouble the northlands these days," Gerin put in. He carefully did not add, No thanks to you. Mavrix had tried to stand against Voldar, the ferocious chief goddess of the Gradi, but had not been strong enough. Baivers, the Elabonian god of barley and brewing, had held off Voldar and the rest of the Gradi pantheon, along with considerable help from the fearsome deities of the monsters under Biton's cave. Gerin wondered whether Mavrix despised Baivers or the monsters' gods more.

  "Well, yes." If anything, Mavrix sounded even less thrilled than he had with Ferdulf. "Even so-"

  Ferdulf ran over to him and caught him by the hand. "Father!" he cried again.

  Mavrix inspected him. If the Sithonia
n god was impressed, he concealed it exceedingly well. "Yes, I am your father," he said. "You summoned me, so I came. Now what do you want?"

  He sounded like Gerin granting a brief audience to a man for whom he could not spare any more time: he wanted Ferdulf to come to the point so he could get back to whatever he had been doing. Ferdulf caught that, too. "Here I am, the son you got on my mother," he exclaimed. "Have you no praise for me? Have you no words of wisdom?"

  Words of wisdom were the last thing Gerin would have asked of Mavrix. If the Sithonian god had chosen to give him any, he would have reckoned true wisdom likely to lie in ignoring them. Here and now, the issue did not arise, for Mavrix only shrugged; the sinuous motion put Gerin in mind of a serpent. "I may be your father," the god said, "but I am not your nursemaid."

  Ferdulf reeled back as if Mavrix had slapped him. However heartless Mavrix's words sounded, Gerin thought they did hold good advice. At least they told Ferdulf in no uncertain terms that he could not rely on Mavrix for anything but his existence.

  Whatever else they did, they infuriated the little demigod. "You can't ignore me!" he shouted. His feet came off the ground. He shot through the air at Mavrix like an angry arrow.

  In his right hand, the Sithonian god bore a wand wreathed in ivy and vine leaves and topped with a pinecone. The thyrsus looked like a harmless ornament. In Mavrix's hands, though, it was a weapon more deadly than the longest, sharpest, heaviest spear any human warrior could carry.

  Mavrix tapped Ferdulf with the wand. Ferdulf groaned and crashed to the ground. "A child who annoys his father gets the stick, as he deserves," the god said to the demigod.

  Ferdulf was used to having more supernatural power than anyone around him. He rose into the air again and hurled himself at his sire. "You can't do that to me!" he cried.

  "Oh, but I can," Mavrix answered, and tapped his son with the thyrsus again. Again, Ferdulf hit the ground, more heavily this time than before. "You need to understand that. Just because I came when you called, you have not the right to abuse me, nor shall you ever." Ferdulf moaned and lay in a heap. Alert as a longtooth, Mavrix stood there watching him. A faint rank odor, of wine lees and old corruption, floated from the god, making Gerin's nose twitch.