“I was trying to save what was mine,” Gerin answered. And I’ve failed, he thought, wondering if he could keep that from Mavrix. That means I have to try something else, and I don’t know what.
“I am not rooted in your northern land well enough to be as effective as I might have been fighting for Sithonia if the Gradi gods were coming there, which the power above all deities prevent,” Mavrix said. “You would do better seeking out the powers in and under your own soil, those who have most to lose if enslaved or expelled by Voldar and her vicious crew.”
He had been vicious himself; neither Stribog nor Lavtrig cared to try conclusions with him a second time. Soon he was out of the realm of the Gradi gods. Gerin, meanwhile, wondered which Elabonian deities Mavrix meant. Biton, perhaps, but anyone else? He put the question to the god who carried his spirit.
“No, not that wretched farseeing twit,” Mavrix said scornfully. “He’ll be useless to you here, I guarantee it. Voldar would chew him up and spit him out while he was still looking every which way. He and Nothing might get on well, though; with luck, they’d bore each other out of existence.”
He sounded very sure of himself, which alarmed Gerin. If Biton was not the answer against the Gradi gods, who was? “Who in the northlands can hope to stand against them?” the Fox persisted.
“I’ve told you everything I know, and more than you deserve,” Mavrix answered, petulant now “This is not my country. I keep saying as much: this is not my land. I don’t keep track of every fribbling, stodgy godlet infesting it, nor would I want to. Since you were foolish enough to choose to be born here, I leave all that up to you.”
“But—” Gerin began.
“Oh, be still till you have flesh to make noise with,” Mavrix said, and Gerin perforce was still. The god went on, “Here we are, returned to this dank, chilly, unpleasant hovel you inhabit. If only you knew the sunshine of Sithonia, the wine, the sea (not all gray and frigid like the nasty ocean splashing your soil, but blue and bright and beautiful), the gleam of polished marble and sandstone yellow as butter, as gold—But you do not, poor deprived thing, and maybe for the best, for you might slay yourself in despair at your lack. Since you are trapped here, I return you now to the really quite ordinary body from which I abstracted you.”
All at once, Gerin was seeing with his own eyes, hearing with his own ears, moving his head, his hands, his legs. There before him stood Mavrix. There too stood Selatre and Rihwin and Fulda, who remained lushly nude. “How long were we gone?” the Fox asked. As Mavrix had said, in his own flesh he could speak again.
“Gone?” Selatre and Rihwin spoke the word together. “You’ve been here all along,” Gerin’s wife went on. “Where did you go? What did you do?” She turned to Mavrix. “Lord of the sweet grape, are the Gradi gods vanquished?”
“No,” Mavrix said. The simple denial brought a gasp of dismay from Rihwin. Mavrix continued, “I did what I could. It was not enough. I can do no more, and so I depart this unpleasant clime.” Like mist under the sun, he began to fade.
Gerin had been with him, and knew he had been beaten. Selatre and Rihwin recognized he meant what he said. But Fulda, like so many people Gerin knew, had unquestioned and unquestioning faith in those above her. Hearing a god admit failure was more than she could bear. She cried, “Do you leave us with nothing, then?”
Mavrix resolidified. You could not tell which way his uniformly dark eyes were turned, but, by the direction in which his head pointed, he was probably looking at her. “So you want me to leave you with something, do you?” he said, and laughed. “Very well. I shall.”
Fulda gasped. At first Gerin thought it was surprise, but after a moment he realized it was something else entirely. Fulda’s eyes closed. Her back arched. Her nipples went stiff and erect. She gasped again, and shuddered all over.
“There,” Mavrix said, sounding smug and self-satisfied, or possibly just satisfied: despite what he’d done on the plane of the gods, he hadn’t disdained Fulda after all. On the contrary, for he continued, “I’ve left you something. In three fourths of a year, you’ll find out exactly what, and that, I have no doubt, will prove interesting for all concerned But now…” He faded again, this time till he disappeared. The shack in which Gerin attempted to perpetrate magic abruptly seemed to resume its normal cramped dimensions, which convinced the Fox Mavrix was truly gone.
Fulda opened her eyes, but she wasn’t looking at the inside of the shack. “Oh,” she said, shivering once more. Then she too realized Mavrix had vanished. “Oh,” she repeated, this time in disappointment. She reached for her tunic and put it back on. Selatre being there, Gerin made a point of not watching her.
He looked instead to his wife and to Rihwin. They plainly shared his thought. “The god didn’t—” Rihwin said.
“The god wouldn’t—” Selatre echoed.
“Didn’t what?” Fulda asked. “Wouldn’t what?”
“Unless we’re all daft, you’re going to have a baby,” Gerin told her. “Quite a baby.” She yelped. No, she hadn’t understood. The Fox sighed. “One more thing to worry about,” he said.
VIII
Selatre shook her head. “I fear the lord of the sweet grape was right in what he told you,” she said to Gerin. “Biton is principally concerned with the valley that holds his shrine and the enchanted wood beyond it. The chief reason he involved himself in the broader affairs of the northlands when the monsters burst out is that they sprang from his valley, or from below it”.
“Oh, a pestilence!” the Fox said. “You’re supposed to tell me what I want to hear, not what you think is true.”
Selatre stared at him. Then, warily, she started to laugh. “You are joking, aren’t you?” Only when he nodded did she relax, a little.
“When you start telling me things for no better reason than you think they’ll please me—” Gerin stopped. “I don’t need to go on with that, because you know better, the gods be praised.” The phrase tasted sour in his mouth. “The gods who are awake and listening to me, anyhow”
“I don’t know whether Mavrix is listening to you, but no one could doubt he’s awake,” Selatre answered. “I went into the village yesterday. Fulda’s courses should have started. They haven’t. She says she hasn’t lain with any of the men there since her last flowing. I believe her. That leaves—”
“Divine ecstasy?” Gerin suggested, not quite so sardonically as he would have liked.
But Selatre’s face was serious as she nodded. “Just so. We were talking about that. It was, I think, different from the ecstasy Biton gave me … but then, he and Mavrix are very different gods. And when next spring comes—”
“We’ll have a little demigod on our hands,” Gerin said. “If, of course, the Gradi haven’t overrun us by then. If they have, they’ll be the ones worrying about a little demigod. It would almost be worthwhile losing, just to find out what they do about that. Almost, I say.”
“We still don’t know how to keep that from happening,” Selatre said.
“Don’t remind me,” Gerin told her. “For all I can tell, what Mavrix was really saying was to give up, because none of the gods on or under the ground of the northlands whom I know are likely to have the power to stop the Gradi gods, or even to care about doing it.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Selatre said. “You’re letting yourself be too gloomy. After all the trouble you’ve had with Mavrix, if you had no hope he’d come right out and say as much. He’d probably gloat about it, as a matter of fact.”
Gerin chewed on that and found himself nodding. “Yes, that’s just what he’d do. He doesn’t love the Gradi gods or what they stand for, so he was willing to go against them, but he doesn’t love me, either. I’ve seen that over the years, and no mistake about it.”
Downstairs, in the great hall, a hideous commotion erupted. Selatre raised an eyebrow. “I’ve heard a lot of strange noises down there, but hardly anything like this. Who’s killing whom, and why are they torturing them before they fin
ally let them die?”
That was an exaggeration of the quality of the racket, but not a large one. “I’ll go down there and tell whoever it is to stuff a pair of drawers in his gob,” Gerin said. “If I have to, I’ll smash a couple of heads together. That generally shuts people up.”
Down he went, left hand on the hilt of his sword. He didn’t know what he’d find when he got downstairs—an argument just this side of a brawl was his best guess. What he did discover was in a way more reassuring, in another way more alarming: Van and Geroge and Tharma sitting around beside an enormous jar of ale that had probably been full when they started it and now was certainly almost empty.
What Gerin and Selatre and probably everyone else in Fox Keep had mistaken for strife was the outlander and the two monsters trying to sing. The result sounded more nearly catastrophic than musical. But that was not what made Gerin snap, “What do you think you’re doing?” at Van.
“Oh, hullo, Fox,” Van said with a broad, foolish grin. “Trying to see if I can hold more ale than these walking fur rugs here. I thought so when I started, but I’m not so sure any more.”
“Lord prince,” Geroge rumbled. He grinned, too, displaying his formidable teeth. The Fox didn’t doubt the grin was meant as friendly, but it raised his hackles all the same. Geroge was at least as strong as Van. He usually behaved himself very well, but who could say how he’d act with a bellyful of ale sloshing around inside him? More to the point, if he decided to behave monstrously, how much damage would he do before he could be controlled or killed?
Like everyone else at Fox Keep, he and Tharma drank ale every day, with their meals and when they were thirsty. But they didn’t drink—or they hadn’t drunk—for the sake of getting drunk, not till now they hadn’t. It was not a habit Gerin wanted to encourage in them.
He glared at Van, wishing his friend had shown better sense. As usual for such wishes, this one came too late. With what he thought was commendable restraint, he said, “Looking into the bottom of a jack of ale is one thing. Looking into the bottom of a jar of ale is something else again. You’ll be clearer on the difference come morning,” he added with malice aforethought.
“Likely tell you’re right.” Van scowled. “And likely tell I’ll have Fand screeching at me, too, making me wish my poor aching head would fall off.” He held his poor, not yet aching head in his hands.
If the prospect of hangovers daunted Geroge and Tharma, they didn’t show it. “Oh, I bless lord Baivers, yes I do, for making me feel so fine,” Geroge howled. He spilled what he probably intended as a little ale on the table for a libation. He wasn’t moving so smoothly as he had been, though, and ended up emptying most of his jack of ale. He didn’t care about the mess; he cared about the missing ale. He got up, went over to the jar, and dug with the dipper. He didn’t get much back for his effort. Peering down into the jar, he howled again, this time in desolation. When words came back to him, he said, “It’s all gone! How did that happen?”
Van laughed then, morose though he’d been a moment before. So did Tharma; she laughed so hard, she fell off her bench and rolled in the rushes before slowly climbing back to her feet. And Gerin said, “Do you think you might have had something to do with it?”
“Who, me?” Geroge’s narrow little eyes went as wide as they could when that idea worked its way into his fuddled wits: it plainly hadn’t occurred to him. “Well, maybe I did.”
He laughed, too, in big, snarling chuckles that would have sent any sensible watchdog running for its life, tail between its legs. Like Tharma, he was turning out to be a good-natured drunk, for which Gerin thanked not only Baivers but every god he could think of this side of Voldar. A nasty, sullen drunken monster was about the last thing Gerin wanted to contemplate. If Geroge rampaged out of control, how was anyone supposed to stop him without spearing him or filling him full of arrows?
The Fox stuck two fingers in the puddle of ale Geroge had spilled on the table. He sucked the brew off one of them, then flicked a golden drop from the other in a libation of his own. “I bless you, Baivers,” he said out loud, and silently appended, because your bounty turns monsters friendly and foolish, not vicious and savage. Considering what they were, that was no small boon from the god.
Van with a hangover was a shuddering horror. But Van had had a great many hangovers in his time. He drank a tiny bit more ale come morning, nibbled at a heel of bread, and did his best to stay away from bright sunlight and loud noises (though Fand didn’t make that latter easy) until his poor abused body had the chance to recover.
Geroge and Tharma felt every bit as bad, if not worse, and had no idea what to do about it. Some forms of virginity were more enjoyable to lose than others. They moaned they were dying, and flinched from the harsh din of their own voices. Gerin did very little to make them more comfortable. The less they enjoyed the aftermath of their debauch, the less likely they were to repeat it.
Having been moderate the day before, he didn’t flinch from leaving the shade of the great hall for the bright sunlight that streamed down into the courtyard. As soon as he went out there, he began to sweat; it was a fine, hot summer’s day.
He wondered if that meant Stribog hadn’t recovered from the drubbing Mavrix gave him. He also wondered what the weather was like west of the Venien, in lands where the Gradi held sway. If Stribog really was out of commission, the peasants might bring in some kind of crop even there. Have to try to find out, he thought. The more he learned about what the Gradi and their gods could do, the better his own chances of figuring out what to do about them.
He climbed up onto the palisade. Everything looked normal enough, as far as the eye could see: the trouble was, the eye couldn’t see far enough. But here, peasants labored in the fields, cattle and sheep grazed on the meadows, pigs foraged for whatever they could find. In the peasant village near the keep, smoke came out the smoke holes in a couple of roofs as women simmered soup or stew for the evening meal.
What was Fulda doing there? Cooking? Weaving? Brewing? Weeding? Whatever she was doing, her courses hadn’t come. She was pregnant, sure enough, and without a human partner. Why had Mavrix chosen to spawn a demigod in the northlands? What sort of demigod would the child be?
Time would answer those questions, provided Gerin remained alive to see the answers. Actually, time would answer those questions whether he remained alive or not, but he preferred not to dwell on that.
He didn’t have to dwell on it for long. The lookout in the watchtower above the castle winded his horn and cried, “A chariot approaching, lord prince, out of the west!” Gerin peered southwest, in the direction of Adiatunnus’ lands. For years, that was the direction from which trouble had come, out of the west. Then the lookout amplified his earlier words: “A chariot along the path by the Niffet.”
Gerin whirled. When he thought about the Niffet these days, he thought of war galleys full of Gradi with axes, every one of the raiders bellowing Voldar’s name. Much to his relief, he saw no galleys. For a little while, he saw no chariot, either. His watchtower was the tallest around, precisely to afford the sentries up there the widest possible view.
No, there it was, coming out from behind a grove of plum trees. The horsemen were trotting along at a pace that, while not the quickest, covered the most ground if you held it for a long time. Somebody up on the palisade next to Gerin said, “From out of Schild Stoutstaff’s holding, maybe.”
“That would be my guess,” Gerin agreed. “Now we have to find out what sort of news he’s bringing.”
When the chariot came up to the keep, the fellow in the car named himself Aripert Aribert’s son, one of Schild’s vassal barons, though not a man the Fox knew well. Since there was only the one car, Gerin’s warriors did not hesitate to lower the drawbridge and let him into the keep.
Once in the courtyard, he jumped down from the car and looked all around, calling, “The Fox! Where is the Fox?” He didn’t know Gerin by sight, either. He was about thirty-five, stocky, with sharp feature
s and a quick, jerky way of moving.
“I’m the Fox.” Gerin had made his way down from the palisade. “What’s gone so wrong in Schild’s barony that you had to rush here and tell me about it?”
“You have the right of it, lord prince,” Aripert said, pacing back and forth. He evidently couldn’t stand to hold still more than a few breaths at a time. He cracked his knuckles, one after another, till they all popped, and hardly seemed aware he was doing it. “The wild men from out of the west, the Gradi, ships full of them landed in Schild’s holding. His keep held against them, and those of his vassals, too, but they burned villages and killed serfs and trampled crops and stole livestock and we’re all going to be hungry this winter on account of it.” He stared at Gerin, as if convinced it was the Fox’s fault.
“We haven’t been sitting idle, Aripert,” Gerin said. Aripert gnawed dead skin at the edge of his thumbnail. Gerin wondered if he had a wife. Living with such constant fidgeting would have driven him mad. But that was not what mattered at the moment. He went on, “Your own overlord has fought against the Gradi at my side.”
“So what?” Aripert said, swatting at something that might have been a gnat and might have been a figment of his imagination. “It didn’t do me any good. It didn’t do Schild’s holding any good.”
“That’s not so,” Gerin said. “It might have been worse for you—it might have been much worse—if we hadn’t. If you don’t believe me, send a messenger down to Adiatunnus and ask him.”
Aripert scratched his head, tugged at his ear, and plucked a hair out of his beard. Spinning it between thumb and forefinger, he answered, “All right, maybe it would have been worse. I don’t know. It was cursed bad, I tell you.” He started pacing again. “How are you going to keep those bastards off the Niffet? That’s what I want to know.” He yanked out his knife and cleaned his nails with it.
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