King of the North

by Harry Turtledove

  Gerin wondered if the Sithonian god now refused to have anything to do with him at all. He also wondered whether he should have brought a pretty boy into the shack instead of Fulda. Mavrix’s tastes sometimes veered in that direction.

  Stubbornly, he kept on working as many variants of the spell as he could imagine. A man without his perseverance—or a man in less desperate straits—would have quit a long time before. The Fox realized he wouldn’t be able to go on much longer, either, not without making an error that would at least invalidate everything he’d already done and at most … he didn’t want to think about all the unpleasant things that might happen then.

  As he was about to give up, the inside of the shack seemed all at once to grow vastly larger, though its exterior dimensions had not changed in any way. Gerin had felt that happen before. The hair prickled up on the back of his neck. Here was Mavrix, so now he had what he’d thought he wanted. How much would he regret seeing his prayers granted?

  “You are the noisiest little man,” the god said, his deep, honeyed voice sounding somewhere in the middle of Gerin’s head rather than in his ears. The Fox was not sure whether Mavrix spoke Sithonian or Elabonian; he took meaning directly, at a level more basic than words.

  Gerin spoke Sithonian, in the hope of making Mavrix better inclined toward him. “I thank you, lord of the sweet grape, lord of fertility, lord of wisdom and wit, for deigning to hear me.”

  “Deigning to hear you?” Mavrix’s eyebrows rose almost all the way to his hairline. His handsome features, had they been human, would have been impossibly mobile. But he was not human, even if his rosebud mouth would have made any boy-lover quiver with lascivious delight. His eyes were all black, fathomless, deep beyond deep, warning of power and terror far beyond any to which a mere human could aspire. “Deigning to hear you?” he repeated. “You were doing your best to deafen me, not so?”

  “I would not have troubled you were I not deep in trouble myself,” Gerin answered, which was no less than truth: even as he spoke, he wondered whether his proposed cure was worse than the Gradi disease.

  “And why should I care a fig for your troubles, lord Gerin, prince of the north?” In Mavrix’s mouth, the Fox’s titles were poisonously sweet. “Why should I not rejoice, in fact?”

  “Because I did not make them, for one,” Gerin answered. “And, for another, because the gods who did make them now purpose turning the northlands into a cold and dreary country where next to nothing will grow, and where for months at a time all will be covered by ice and snow.” Hearing his own accidental rhyme, he wished he’d thought to include metre as well; Mavrix appreciated such artful touches.

  “That sounds—distasteful,” the Sithonian god admitted. “But, I ask you again, why should I care? These barbarous northlands are scarcely part of my normal purview, you know. You Elabonians are quite bad enough”—the fringes on his fawnskin tunic fluttered as he shivered to show what he thought of Elabonians—“and the woodsrunning savages now infesting the land worse. If something dreadful befalls the lot of you—so what?”

  “The Gradi are worse, and so are their gods,” Gerin said, stubborn still. “You may not think much of Dyaus, and I have no notion what you think of Taranis, Teutatis, and Esus, but you have your place and they have theirs, and you don’t try to drive them off, nor they you.”

  He didn’t mention Baivers, some of whose aspects were close enough to those of Mavrix to make them compete with rather than complementing each other. He especially didn’t mention Biton, whose quarrel with Mavrix had led to banishing the monsters infesting the northlands back to their gloomy caverns. If the god remembered those quarrels, he would remind Gerin of them. If he didn’t, Gerin wasn’t going to remind him.

  Mavrix sniffed. “I have never impinged upon these Gradi gods, nor they on me. For all I know, you lie for your own reasons. Humans are like that.” He sniffed again, in fine contempt.

  But he wasn’t so smart as he thought he was, because, while suspicious of Gerin’s arguments, he didn’t notice the logical flaws and omissions in them. If you were sly enough and quick enough and lucky enough, you could guide him like a man leading a barely broken horse. You’d never be sure he’d go in the direction you wanted him to take, but if you made all the other choices look worse, you had a chance.

  Mavrix, though, was no horse, but a god, with a god’s abilities and strength. Gerin said, “If you doubt me, look into my mind. See for yourself my dealings with the Gradi and with Voldar. With your divine wisdom, you will know whether I lie or not.”

  “I do not need your permission, little man; I can do that any time I choose,” Mavrix said. A moment later, he added, “I do think better of you—a bit better—for the invitation.”

  And then, all at once, Gerin’s world turned inside out. It did not feel as if Mavrix entered his mind, but more as if his mind suddenly became a small fragment of the god’s. He’d expected Mavrix to grub for facts like a man opening drawers in a cabinet. Instead, the power of the gods intellect simply poured through him, as if he were air and Mavrix rain. The search was far quicker, far more thorough, and far more awesome than he’d expected.

  When Mavrix spoke to him again, it was almost as if he listened to, almost as if he were a part of, the god’s thoughts, which echoed all through his own mind: “What you say is true. These Gradi are indeed nasty and vicious men, and their gods nasty and vicious deities. That they should infest their own homeland is quite bad enough, that they should seek to spread to this relatively temperate and tolerant district intolerable. And, being intolerable, it shall not be tolerated. I commence.”

  Mavrix set out on a journey across the plane the gods customarily inhabited, a plane that impinged on the mundane world of men and crops and weather but was not really a part of it. He had not released the Fox’s mind from its place, if that was the right word, as part of his own, and so Gerin, willy-nilly, accompanied him on his travels.

  Afterwards, Gerin was never quite sure how far to trust his sensory impressions. Eyes and ears and skin were not made to take in the essence of the divine plane, nor was he really along in the flesh, but only as a sort of fleabite, or at most a wart, on Mavrix’s psyche. Did the god truly drink his way through an ocean of wine? Did he really fornicate his way through … ? If he did, why on earth—or not on earth—would Fulda have drawn the least part of his notice? Even the dim part-understanding of what might have just happened left the Fox’s sensorium spinning.

  Then the going got more difficult (not harder, Gerin thought, being unable at the moment to imagine anything harder than …). Gerin felt Mavrix’s surprise, discomfort, and displeasure as if they were his own. They were, in fact, his own, and more than his own.

  Pettishly, Mavrix snapped, “I should never have let you entice me into this predicament.” The Sithonian god did not take well to discomfort of any sort, that being a negation of everything he stood for. In the little mental cyst inside Mavrix’ mind that remained his own, Gerin had all he could do to keep from bursting into laughter that would surely anger the god. Enticing Mavrix was just what he’d hoped to do. And Mavrix would have to endure more unpleasantness if he reversed his metaphysical route … wouldn’t he?

  Gerin wondered about that. For all he knew, Mavrix could break free of where he was and be somewhere else without bothering to traverse the space in between. And even if he couldn’t do that, the combination of overwhelming wine and even more overwhelming satiety might be plenty to counteract whatever lack of pleasure the god knew now.

  And then, without warning, Mavrix found himself in a place, or a sort of a place, Gerin recognized from his dreams: the chilly forest to which Voldar had summoned him during his dream. “How bleak,” Mavrix murmured, moving along a track in it.

  This is the domain of the Gradi gods, Gerin thought, not knowing whether Mavrix was paying any attention to his small separate fragment of consciousness.

  “Really?” the god replied as he came to a snow-filled clearing. “And here
all the while I thought I was back in my native Sithonia. The grapes and olives are looking particularly fine this time of year, aren’t they?”

  Had Gerin been there corporeally, he would have turned red. Having Mavrix flay him with sarcasm wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he summoned the god. Of course, when you did summon a god, what you got wasn’t always what you had in mind, for gods had minds of their own.

  He tried to pitch his thoughts so they would carry to Mavrix, forming them as much like speech as he could: “Voldar summoned me to this place in a dream.”

  “A nightmare, it must have been,” the Sithonian god replied. Maybe he shuddered, maybe he didn’t: Gerin’s view of this plane shook back and forth. Mavrix went on, “Why any self-respecting deity would choose to inhabit—or I might better say, infest—such a place when so many better are there for the taking must remain eternally beyond me.”

  “We like it here.”

  Had that actually been a voice, it would have been deep and rumbling, like an outsized version of Van’s. Gerin didn’t truly hear it; it was more as if an earthquake with meanings attached had shaken the center of his mind. A great form reared up out of the snow. Gerin sensed it as being half man, half great white bear, now the one predominating, now the other.

  “This ugly thing cannot possibly be Voldar,” Mavrix said with a distinct sniff in his voice. Sniff or not, Gerin thought he was right: the Gradi god, whether in human or ursine form, was emphatically male. Mavrix directed his attention toward the god rather than the Fox. “Who or what are you, ugly thing?”

  Given a choice, Gerin would not have antagonized anything as ferocious looking as that white, looming apparition. He was not given a choice; that was one of the risks you took in dealing with gods. The half-bear, half-man shape roared and bellowed out its reply: “I am Lavtrig, mighty hunter. Who are you, little mincing, puling wretch, to come spreading the stink of perfume over this, the home of the grand gods?”

  “Grand compared to what?” Mavrix said. He waved his left hand, the one in which he carried his thyrsus, an ivy-tipped wand more powerful than any spear would have been in the hands of a mere man. “Stand aside, before I rid the plane of the gods of an odious presence. I have no quarrel with underlings, not unless they seek to trouble their betters. Since, in your case, anything this side of a horse turd would be an improvement, I suggest you leave off the business of troubling altogether.”

  Lavtrig roared with rage and rushed forward. He had more claws and teeth and thews than Gerin cared to contemplate. The Fox had hoped Mavrix would fight the Gradi gods. He hadn’t intended to get stuck, absolutely helpless, in the middle of such a fight. Mavrix didn’t care what he intended.

  Wand notwithstanding, the Sithonian god’s semblance was as nothing when measured against Lavtrig’s fearsome aspect. But, as Gerin should have realized, appearances among gods were apt to be even more deceiving than among mankind. When Lavtrig’s hideous jaws closed, they closed on nothingness. But when Mavrix tapped the Gradi god with his thyrsus, the howl of pain he evoked might have been heard in distant Mabalal, by the deities there if not by the men.

  “Run along now, noisy thing,” Mavrix said. “If you force me to become truly vexed, the barbarians who worship you will have to invent something else more hideous than themselves, for you will be gone for good.”

  Lavtrig bellowed again, this time more with rage than with pain, and tried to keep fighting. He scratched, he clawed, he snapped—all to no effect. Sighing, Mavrix lashed out with a sandal-shod foot. Lavtrig spun through the air—if the gods’ plane had air—and crashed against a pine. Its burden of snow fell on him. He writhed once or twice, feebly, but did not get up to resume the struggle.

  Mavrix let him lie and strode on. “Could you really have destroyed him?” Gerin asked.

  “Oh, are you still here?” the Sithonian god said, as if he’d forgotten all about the Fox. “A god can do anything he imagines he can do.” The answer did not strike Gerin as altogether responsive, but he could hardly have been in a worse position to demand more detail from Mavrix.

  The god he had summoned to his aid strode down a path through more snow-covered trees. If Mavrix was cold, he did not show it. Once, as if to amuse himself, he pointed his thyrsus at one of the pines. Clumps of bright flowers sprang into being at the base of its trunk. Gerin wondered if they continued to exist after Mavrix stopped paying attention to them.

  Golden-eyed wolves stared out of the woods at Mavrix: wolves as big as bears, as big as horses, divine wolves, the primeval savage essence of wolf concentrated in their bodies as a cook might concentrate a sauce by boiling away all excess. When Gerin felt their terrible eyes on him, he wanted to quail and run, even though he knew he was not there in body. Wolves like that could—would—gulp down his very soul.

  Mavrix pulled out a set of reed pipes and blew music such as had never been heard in the grim realm of the Gradi gods, not in all the ages since they shaped the place to their own satisfaction. It was the music of summer and joy and love, the music of wine and hot nights and desire. Had he been able to, Gerin would have wept with the sorrow of knowing that, try as he might, he would never be fully able to remember or reproduce what he heard.

  And the wolves! All at once, utterly without warning, they lost their ferocity and came rushing through the snow at Mavrix, not to rend him but to frisk at his heels like so many friendly puppies. They yipped. They leaped. They played foolish games with one another. They paired off and mated. They did everything but guard the road, as the Gradi gods had plainly intended them to do.

  Amusement seeped from Mavrix’s mind to Gerin’s. “Perhaps we should throw cold water on some of them,” the Sithonian god said. “Plenty of cold water here.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Gerin replied. “Why not let them enjoy themselves? I have the feeling this is the first time they’ve ever been able to.”

  “That is nothing less than the truth,” Mavrix said, and then, “I own that I responded to your summons with resentment, but now I am glad I did. These Gradi gods need to be dealt with. They have no notion of fun.” He spoke as the Fox did when passing sentence on some particularly vicious robber.

  Gerin wondered if the Sithonian god could instill levity into whatever Voldar used for a heart. If he could, that would be a bigger miracle than any he had yet worked.

  But Mavrix had not yet won through to confront the chief goddess of the Gradi. When he stepped out into a clearing, Gerin wondered if Voldar would await him there. But it was not Voldar. It was not anything anthropomorphic at all, but a whirling column of rain and mist and ice and snow, stretching up as far as the eye could see.

  From the middle of the column, a voice spoke: “Get you gone. This is not your place. Get you gone.”

  At Mavrix’s feet, the wolves whined and whimpered, as if realizing they’d betrayed themselves with a stranger and were going to be made to regret it by the powers that were their proper masters. Mavrix, however, spoke lightly, mockingly, as was his way. “What have we here? The divine washtub for this miserable place? Or is it but the chamber pot?”

  “I am Stribog,” the voice declared. “I say you shall not pass. Take your jests and japes somewhere we do not yet touch, then await us there, for one day, rest assured, we shall overwhelm it and quench them.”

  “Ah—right the second time,” Mavrix said cheerfully, perhaps to Gerin, perhaps to Stribog. “It is the chamber pot.”

  He moved out into the clearing. Stribog did not attack as Lavtrig had. Instead, the Gradi god hurled all the vile weather he had inside him straight at Mavrix. Gerin’s soul felt frozen. Here, he saw, was the god who had raised the summer storms against him and his army. Those, though, had been storms of the world, even if divinely raised. This was the very stuff of the gods, used by one to fight another.

  And Mavrix noticed this onslaught, where he had been impervious to Lavtrig’s. The chill and wet Stribog raised struck at his spirit. He grunted and said, “Now see—someone’s g
one and spilled it. We’ll just have to set it to rights once more.”

  The wolves fled back to their gloomy haunts. With Mavrix’s attention not on them, they forgot the dimmest notion of happiness. Too, they were soaked to their metaphysical skins. Stribog had indeed poured a bucket of cold water on them, a bucket big as the world.

  Mavrix lashed out with his wand, as he had against Lavtrig. It must have hurt, too, for Stribog bellowed in pain and rage. But the Gradi god was a more diffuse entity than Lavtrig; he had no central place to strike that would do him lasting damage. And his rain and ice, his winds and lightnings, hurt Mavrix, too. The Sithonian god’s anguish washed through Gerin, who knew that, had his spirit been there alone, he would swiftly have been destroyed.

  When Mavrix tried to go forward against the storm that was Stribog, he found himself unable. The Gradi god’s laughter boomed like thunder. “Here you will perish, you who try to trouble Gradihome!” he cried. “Here you will drown; here you will rest forevermore.”

  “Oh, be still, arrogant windbag,” Mavrix said irritably, and for a moment Stribog was still, the storm silent. Even as it resumed, Mavrix went on, “Not just an arrogant windbag, but a stupid one, too. If you water a fertility god, you promote—”

  “Growth!” Gerin’s mind exclaimed.

  “There, you see?” Mavrix told him. “You have more wit to you than this blowhard. Not much of a compliment, I fear, but you may have it if you want it.”

  And with that, he began to grow, to soak up all the stormstuff Stribog flung at him and make it his own instead of letting it remain a weapon belonging to the Gradi god. The pain he felt at Stribog’s attacks vanished, or rather was transmuted into a satisfaction somewhere between that of a good meal and that which follows the act of love.