Wisdom of the Fox gtf-1

by Harry Turtledove

  As sunset neared, Gerin bought a sheep from a village through which he passed. That provoked fresh bemusement from Aragis, who, like a large majority of lords, was accustomed to taking what he needed from his serfs regardless of whether it was properly part of his feudal dues. The grand duke also seemed surprised when the Fox told some of his warriors to cut firewood rather than taking it from the serfs or putting them to work. But he did not question Gerin about it and, indeed, after a few minutes ordered his own men to help those of his ally.

  With all four moons now past full, the early hours of the night were unusually dark. Although the evening was warm and sultry, Gerin ordered the fires kept burning brightly. "The last thing I want is for the monsters to take us unawares," he said, after which he got no arguments.

  The dancing flames kept more men sitting around them and talking than would have happened on most nights. After a while, Drago the Bear turned to Van and said, "What about a tale for us, to make the time pass by?" To several of Aragis' men sitting close to him, he added, "You've never heard a yarnspinner to match him, I promise you."

  "Aye, give us a tale, then," one of those troopers said eagerly, and in a moment many more—and many of Gerin's men as well—took up the cry.

  Van got to his feet with a show of shyness Gerin knew to be assumed. The outlander said, "I hate to tell a tale now, friends, for after Drago's spoken of me so, how can I help but disappoint?"

  "You never have yet," one of Gerin's men called. "Give us a tale of far places—you must've seen more of 'em than any man alive."

  "A tale of far places?" Van said. "All right, I'll give you another story of Mabalal, the hot country where they teach the monkeys to gather pepper for 'em—some of you will remember my tale about that. But this is a different yarn; you might call it the tale of the mountain snake, even though it's really about the snake's head, as you'll see.

  "Now, they have all manner of snakes in Mabalal. The plains snake, if you'll believe it, is so big that he even hunts elephants now and again; the only time the natives go after him is when he's fighting one of those huge beasts."

  "What's an elephant?" somebody asked. Gerin knew about elephants, but had his doubts about serpents big enough to hunt them—although he'd never managed to catch his friend in a lie about his travels. After Van explained, the warrior who'd asked the question was loudly dubious about the elephant's snaky trunk, though Gerin knew that was a genuine part of its anatomy.

  "Well, never mind," the outlander said. "This story's not about elephants or plains snakes, anyhow. Like I said, it's about mountain snakes. Mountain snakes, now, aren't as big as their cousins of the plain, but they're impressive beasts, too. They have a fringe of golden scales under their chins that looks like a beard, and a crest of pointed red scales down the back of their necks almost like a horse's mane. When they're burrowing in the mountains, the sound their scales make reminds you of bronze blades clashing against each other."

  "Are they venomous?" Gerin asked; unlike most if not all of his companions, he was in part interested in Van's stories for their natural—or perhaps unnatural—history.

  "I should say they are!" Van answered. "But that's not why the men of Mabalal hunt them—in fact, it'd be a good reason to leave 'em alone. The snakes sometimes grow these multicolored stones in their heads, the way oysters grow pearls, but these stones are supposed to make you invisible. That's what they say in Mabalal, anyhow.

  "There was this wizard there, a chap named Marabananda, who wanted a snakestone and needed an axeman to help him get it. He hired me, mostly on account of I'm bigger'n any three Mabalali you could find.

  "Marabananda wove gold letters into a scarlet cloth and cast a spell of sleep over them. Then he carried the cloth out to one of the mountain snakes' nests. The snake heard him coming—or smelled him, or did whatever snakes do—and stuck its head out to see what was going on. He held the cloth in front of it, and as soon as the mountain snake looked, it was caught—snakes can't blink, you know, so it couldn't get free of the spell even for a moment.

  "Down came my axe! Off flew the head! The snake's body, back in its burrow, jerked and twisted so much that the ground shook, just like the earthquake that knocked down the temple at Ikos. And Marabananda, he got out his knives and cut into the head—and damn me to the five hells if he didn't pull out one of those shiny, glowing snakestones I was telling you about.

  " 'I'm rich!' he yells, capering around like a madman. 'I'm rich! I can walk into the king's treasure house and carry away all the gold and silver and jewels I please, and no one will see me. I'm rich!'

  " 'Uh, lord wizard, sir,' says I, 'you're holding the stone now, and I can still see you.'

  "Well, Marabananda says this is on account of I'm just a dirty foreigner, and too unenlightened for wizardry to touch. But the Mabalali, he says, they're more spiritually sensitive, and so the magic will work on them. He wouldn't listen to me when I tried to tell him different. But I did talk him into not trying till dead of night, in case he was wrong.

  "Around midnight, off he went. He would have had me come with him, but I'd already shown the magic didn't work on me. He got to the treasure, and—" Van paused for dramatic effect.

  "What happened?" half a dozen people demanded in the same breath.

  The outlander bellowed laughter. "Poor damned fool, the first guard who spied him going in where he didn't belong struck off his head, same as I did with the mountain snake. I guess it goes to show the snakestone not only didn't make old Marabananda invisible to the guard, it let the guard see something even the wizard couldn't."

  "What's that?" Gerin got the question in before anyone else could.

  "Why, that he was a blockhead, of course," Van replied. "When he didn't come back from his little trip after a bit, I figured it had gone sour for him and I got out of there before the royal guardsmen came around with a pile of questions I couldn't answer. I don't know what happened to the mountain snake's head after that. Just like life, stories don't always have neat, tidy endings."

  By the way the warriors clapped their hands and came up to chatter with Van, they liked the story fine, neat, tidy ending or no. Aragis told him, "If ever you find life dull at Fox Keep, you can stay at my holding for as long as you like, on the strength of your tales alone." When Van laughed and shook his head, the grand duke persisted, "Or if you decide you can't stomach staying with your Trokmê-tempered ladylove another moment, the same holds good."

  "Ah, Archer, now you really tempt me," Van said, but he was still laughing.

  "I'm for my blankets," Gerin said. "Any man with a dram of sense will do likewise. We may be fighting tomorrow, and we will be fighting the day after."

  Off in the distance, a longtooth roared. Some of the horses tethered to stakes and to low-hanging branches snorted nervously; that sound was meant to instill fear. It had made Gerin afraid many times in the past. Now, though, he found it oddly reassuring. It was part of the night he'd known all his life. The monsters' higher, more savage screeches he found far more terrifying.

  * * *

  Morning came all too soon, as it has a way of doing. The sun shining in Gerin's face made him sit up and try to knuckle sleep from his eyes. Where all four moons had been absent at sunset, now they hung like pale lamps in the western sky. Soon they would draw apart again, and Gerin would be able to stop worrying about their phases for a while—although he promised himself he'd check their predicted motions in the book of tables from time to time.

  Drivers gulped hasty breakfasts of hard-baked biscuits, smoked meat, and crumbly white cheese, then hurried to harness their horses to their chariots. The warriors who rode with them, generally older men of higher rank, finished their breakfasts while the drivers worked. The food was no better, but time could be a luxury, too.

  As soon as the chariots rolled out of Gerin's land into the debatable ground south and west of his holding, the troopers saw more and more monsters. The monsters saw them, too; their hideous howls split the air. T
he Fox wondered if they were warning their fellows—and Adiatunnus' men.

  In the debatable lands between Gerin's holding and the territory Adiatunnus had taken for himself when the Trokmoi swarmed over the Niffet, brush and shrubs and saplings grew close to the road. The barons who'd owned that land before had been less careful of it than the Fox had with his. Now most of them were dead or fled. Gerin claimed much of their holdings, but the woodsrunners made his possession too uncertain for him to send woodsmen onto it.

  The first arrows came from the cover of the roadside scrub a little past noon. One hummed past his head, close enough to make him start. He snatched up his shield and moved up in the car so he could hope to protect himself and Raffo both. "Keep going," he told the driver, and waved the rest of the chariots on as well.

  "What?" Van said indignantly. "Aren't you going to stop and hunt down those cowardly sneaks who shoot without showing their faces?"

  "No," Gerin answered, his voice flat. The unadorned word made Van gape and splutter, as he'd thought it would. When the outlander fell silent, the Fox explained, "I am not going to slow down in any way, shape, form, color, or size, not for monsters, not for Trokmoi. That's what Adiatunnus wants me to do, so he'll have more time to ready himself against us. I don't aim to give it to him."

  "It's not manly, ignoring an enemy who's shooting at you," Van grumbled.

  "I don't care," Gerin said, which set Van spluttering again despite their years of friendship. Gerin went on, "I am not fighting this war to be manly. I'm not even fighting it for loot, though anything I take from the Trokmoi helps me and hurts them. The only reason I'm fighting it is because I'll have to do it later and on worse terms if I don't do it now. Fighting it now means moving as fast as we can. We weren't quite quick enough the last time we struck at Adiatunnus. This time, the gods willing, we will be."

  Van studied him some time in silence. At last the outlander said, "Me, I've heard you call Aragis the Archer ruthless a time or three. If he wanted to hang the same name on you, I think it'd fit."

  "And what does that have to do with unstoppering the jar of ale?" Gerin asked. "I do what I have to do, the best way I can see to do it. You'd better pass up the little fight if you intend to win the big one."

  "Put that way, it sounds good enough," Van admitted. He still looked unhappy, like a man forced to go against his better judgment. "When somebody shoots at me, though, I just want to jump down from the car, chase him till I catch him, and leave him as pickings for the crows and the foxes—no offense to you—and the flies."

  "That's what the Trokmoi want us to do," Gerin answered patiently. "When you fight a war, you're better off not doing what your foe has in mind for you."

  "You'll have your way here with me or without me," Van said, but then relented enough to add, "So you know, Captain, you have it with me—I suppose."

  With that Gerin had to be content. By the time his army drew out of range of the archers, they'd had two horses and one man wounded, by luck none of them badly. A small enough price to pay for avoiding delay, he thought, relieved it was not worse.

  He kept the chariots rolling almost up to the moment of sunset before stopping and sacrificing some of the hens he'd brought from Fox Keep. "Adiatunnus may know we're coming," he said, "but with luck he doesn't know we'll be in his lands so soon. We should start hitting him early tomorrow; we've made fine time coming down from my keep."

  When the sun set, the night was very dark, for none of the moons would rise for more than two hours. That stretch of evening blackness would just grow over the next several days, too, till swift-moving Tiwaz sped round to the other side of the sun and began to illuminate the night once more. It worried Gerin. Because of the ghosts, his men could do little in the night, but he'd already seen that that did not hold for the monsters.

  He took such precautions as he could, posting sentry squadrons all around the main area where his men and Aragis' rested. The Archer's troopers were inclined to complain about having their sleep interrupted. Gerin stared them down, saying, "When my warriors come south to your lands, we'll be under the grand duke's commands, and he'll make the arrangements he thinks best. Now the worries are mine, and I'll meet them in my own way."

  He did not look to Aragis for support; this too was his worry. Had the Archer chosen to argue with him, he'd been ready to lose his temper in as spectacularly dramatic a way as he could. When he was through dealing with the grand duke's men, though, Aragis got up and said, "The prince of the north is right—he leads here. Anyone who doesn't fancy that will answer to him here and then to me after we go south." Out went the sentries without another word.

  Gerin bundled himself in his bedroll and soon fell asleep. What seemed like moments later, shouts of alarm rang out from the sentries, and mixed with them the monsters' screams. The Fox had his helm on his head, his shield on his arm, and his sword in his hand and was on his feet and running toward the fighting before he fully understood where he was.

  As soon as the situation did sink in, Gerin realized whoever led the monsters—whether that was Adiatunnus or some of the more clever creatures—knew how best to use them. Instead of attacking the troopers, who were armed and at least partly armored and could fight back, the monsters turned their fury on the long lines of tethered horses.

  There dreadful din and chaos reigned. The horses screamed and kicked and bucked under the savage teeth and claws of their attackers. Some of them tore loose the lines by which they were tethered and ran off into the night. Every one that got away would have to be recaptured later—if Gerin and his men could manage that. At the same time, though, every horse that fled drew monsters away from the main point of the assault, which left the Fox unsure how to feel about the flight.

  He had little time for feeling, anyhow—nothing to do but slash and hack and keep his shield up to hold fangs away from flesh and pray that in the darkness and confusion he didn't hurt any of his own men, or Aragis'. The fear-maddened horses were as appalled to have men close by them as monsters. Someone not far from Gerin went down with a muffled groan as a hoof caught him in the midsection.

  He stabbed a monster that was scrambling up onto a horse's back—and leaving long, bleeding claw tracks in the beast's flanks. The monster howled and sprang at him. He slashed it. It screamed in pain and fled. The hot, coppery smell of its blood and the horse's filled his nose.

  Pale Nothos was the first moon over the eastern horizon. By the time he rose, the warriors had managed to drive the monsters back into the wood from which they'd come. "Put more wood on the fire and start another one over here," Gerin shouted. "We have a lot of work to do yet tonight."

  His army was still at it when Tiwaz, Elleb, and Math rose in a tight cluster a couple of hours after Nothos appeared. The men went out by squads to bring back the horses that had bolted, but that was the smaller part of what they needed to do. Treating the animals' wounds—and their panic—was a far bigger job. The drivers, men who dealt most intimately with their teams, did the greater part of the work. The rest of the troopers lent what help they could.

  "I mislike everything about this," Gerin said gloomily. "Who knows what the beasts will do when they next face the monsters, or even smell them?"

  "I'd not yet thought past this night," Aragis said. "Did we bring enough spare animals to make up for the ones we lost and those hurt too badly to pull a car?"

  "I think so," the Fox answered; he'd been trying to run his own mental count, but confusion didn't make it easy. He looked at the hairy corpses scattered over the grass. "We hurt the monsters badly here; I don't think they'll try anything like that again. The question is, was the once enough?"

  "We'll know come morning." Aragis yawned. "I don't know if we'll have any wits left by then, though. I'm dead for sleep, and I'm for my blanket."

  "And I," Gerin said with a matching yawn. "One more thing for Adiatunnus to pay for—and he shall."

  When the sun rose, Gerin stumbled over to a nearby stream and splashed cold water
on his face to give himself a brittle semblance of alertness. Then he examined the horses the monsters had attacked. They looked worse by daylight than they had in the night, with blood dried on their coats and matted in their manes, with gashes the drivers had missed by the light of moons and fires, with mud slapped on the wounds the men had seen. He wondered how they would fare when they had to draw the chariots, but had no choice. He waved for the drivers to harness them.

  Because the animals were sore and nervous, that took longer than it might have. But once they were hitched to the chariots, they pulled them willingly enough. Van drew a clay flute from a pouch on his belt and began a mournful, wailing tune that sounded as if it had come off the plains of Shanda. He assumed an expression of injured dignity when Gerin asked him to put the flute away for fear of frightening the horses.

  The border post Adiatunnus had set up in imitation of Elabonian practice was empty and deserted; he must have got wind that Gerin was moving against him.

  "We move straight on," the Fox commanded. "No stopping for loot anywhere. Until we run up against Adiatunnus' main force and smash it, we haven't accomplished a thing."

  But when the army came to a peasant village, Aragis ordered his chariots out of the road to trample the wheat and barley growing in the fields around it. After a moment's hesitation, Gerin waved for his warriors to join the Archer's. "I hate to hurt the serfs," he said, "but if I strike a blow at the Trokmoi thereby, how can I keep from doing it?"

  "You can't, so don't fret yourself," Van answered. "You go to war to win; you said as much yourself. Otherwise you're a fool."

  The peasants themselves had vanished, along with most of their livestock. The army took a few chickens and a half-grown pig, set fire to the serfs' huts, and rolled on.

  Perhaps the next village they came to had planted earlier than the first; the wheat and rye growing around it had already turned golden. That meant the crops were nearing ripeness. It also meant they would burn. The warriors tossed torches into the fields near the road, watched flames lick across them. The serfs would have a hungry winter. Gerin vowed to himself to work enough destruction in Adiatunnus' holding to make their Trokmê masters starve, too.