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 Trokmê 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 Trokmê 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 Trokmê. 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.”
Whatever it was, it was dreadful going. Some small streams had climbed out of their banks, their water pouring in brown sheets across fields already sodden from the downpour. As had that first lot across which the army had come, serfs huddled in their villages, looking out with glum astonishment on the ruin of the year’s crops. Gerin shuddered to think what winter would be like. The peasants were liable to end up eating grass and bark and one another. Uprisings started after years like this, among men who had nothing left to lose.
Toward evening (or so the Fox thought; by then, he seemed to have been traveling forever), the army did come across some Gradi: a double handful of the invaders were trudging, or rather squelching, across a field, oiled-leather rain capes over their heads. “There they are!” Gerin shouted. “The men whose gods are making this campaign so horrid. What do you say we pay those gods back for the grief they’ve given us?”
Afterwards, he didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry he’d put it that way. The Gradi, spying his forces coming out of the rain at about the same time as he saw them, started running clumsily toward some trees bordering the edge of the field. The ground was mucky, but not quite so impossible as some he’d been through. That meant chariots could outdistance men afoot. His troopers cut the Gradi off from escape, then jumped down and slaughtered them, one after another. The water standing in the field was puddled here and there with red till the rain eventually diluted it and washed it away.
The fight itself wasn’t what disturbed Gerin. But the savage glee both Elabonians and Trokmoi had taken in massacring the Gradi gave him pause, even though—and perhaps especially because—he’d encouraged them to do just that. Putting the best face he could on it, he told Adiatunnus, “There—you see? Every time we come on them, we beat them.”
“Truth that,” Adiatunnus said. “The warriors, we can beat them, sure and we can.” He didn’t sound happy about it, continuing, “And what good does that do us, I ask you? When the gods and goddesses are all after pissing out of the heavens down onto us, what good does killing men do?”
“If we hadn’t shown we could do that, the Gradi gods and goddesses wouldn’t have joined the fight against us,” Gerin said.
“Are you saying that’d be better, now, or worse?” Adiatunnus asked, and splashed off before the Fox could reply.
The ghosts did not trouble the army that night, not with the fallen Gradi nearby to give them their boon of blood. But rain and sleet kept pelting down, which made the encampment as wretched as it had been the night before. Gerin wondered if Voldar would appear to him when he slept (if he slept, wet and cold as he was), but he remembered nothing after finally dropping off.
Dawn was the same misnomer it had been since the storm began. The Fox got the army moving more by refusing to believe it would not move than any other way. Exhausted, dripping men hitched exhausted, dripping horses to chariots and did their best to keep moving west against the Gradi.
Gerin would have relished a big fight that day. It would have been a focus for the anger that filled his men. But how could you fight back against a gray sky that kept pouring rain and ice on your head? You couldn’t, which was precisely the problem.
“You won’t make ’em go tomorrow,” Van said as they slowly slogged on. “Damn me to the five hells if I know how you made ’em go today.”
“They’re more afraid of me than of the Gradi gods and goddesses right now,” the Fox said. “They know what I can do, and they still aren’t sure about them.”
But by the next day it wasn’t just streams out of their banks, it was rivers. And rain and sleet turned to hail and then to snow. Gerin shook a fist at the heavens, wishing he had a bow that could reach beyond them. Wishing was futile, as usual.
Shivering, teeth chattering, he gave in. “We go back,” he said.
VII
Back on the eastern side of the Venien River, in territory Adiatunnus controlled, the weather was cool and rainy. No one there seemed willing to believe the tales the returning warriors told of what they had endured trying to penetrate to the heart of the Gradi power.
“Only thing I can think of,” Gerin said, standing close to the fire roaring in the hearth at Adiatunnus’ great hall, “is that Voldar and the rest don’t hold full sway this far east. Not yet, anyhow.”
Adiatunnus’ long face grew even more dolorous than it had been of late when he heard the Fox name the Gradi goddess. Gerin didn’t care. Defiance burned like fever in him. Maybe it was making him delirious, as fever sometimes did. He didn’t care about that, either. He wanted to hit back at the Gradi any way he could, and at their deities, too.
“How will you keep ’em from stretching their sway, though?” Adiatunnus demanded. He too stood close by the fire, as if he couldn’t get warm enough. The Fox understood that, for he felt the same way. “You’re nobbut a man, lord prince, and a man who fights a god—or even a goddess—he loses afore he begins.”
“Of course he does,” Gerin answered, “if he’s stupid enough to make the fight straight on. Gods are stronger than men, and they see farther than men, too. That doesn’t mean they’re smarter than men, though.”
“And how smart d’you need to be to step on a cockroach, now?” Adiatunnus returned. “That’s what you are to the gods, Fox: lord Gerin the Bug, prince of cockroaches.”
&
nbsp; “No doubt,” Gerin said, annoying Adiatunnus by refusing to be annoyed himself. “But if I can get other gods angry at the ones the Gradi follow, and if I can steer them in the right direction—” Listening to himself, he could gauge how desperate he was. Playing with vipers—even the ones Van had described—was a safer business than getting involved with the gods. But if he didn’t get divine aid of his own, the Gradi and their grim deities would swallow up the whole of the northlands. He felt it in his bones.
“And which gods will you summon, now?” Adiatunnus sounded both anxious and worried. “Our own, now, they willna face the ones the Gradi follow. So we’ve seen, to our sorrow. Is it any different with your Elabonian powers?”
“I don’t know,” Gerin said. That wasn’t all he didn’t know: he was wondering if he could make Father Dyaus pay any real attention to the affairs of the material world at all. The head of the Elabonian pantheon had swallowed up the savor of any number of fat-wrapped thighbones over the years; could he now give value for value? Gerin had taken his power for granted till he saw how Voldar supported the Gradi. Ever since, and especially since the storm, he’d wondered … and worried.
“‘I don’t know’ isn’t much to rest the hopes o’ the land on,” Adiatunnus said.
“If I thought you were wrong, I would say so,” Gerin answered. “As a matter of fact, I don’t intend to summon an Elabonian god to deal with the goddess and the gods the Gradi follow. There’s a foreign god with whom I’ve dealt before …”
He stopped. Adiatunnus noticed him stopping. “Tell me more,” the Trokmê urged. “What foreign spirit is it, now? What powers has he got?”
“Mavrix is the Sithonian god of wine and poetry and fertility and beauty,” the Fox answered. “Along with Biton, he’s also the god who drove the monsters back underground after the earthquake.”
“A mighty god indeed,” Adiatunnus said, looking impressed. “I was talking with one of those monsters, that I was, figuring ways to smash you to powder, Fox, when he softly and silently vanished away, leaving nobbut the rank smell of him behind to show he’d been no dream.”
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