The Fathering Land

by Tripp Greyson

I heaved a long sigh and looked around at the shell-shocked Elves. "You heard him, boys. God's given us a pass to spill our seed. A direct order, actually." I put my hand on my chest. "We must each, all of us, take one for the team."

  "Two, actually!" a happy young voice stated. Genewín rubbed his hands together gleefully. "Oh boy, five girls at time! Thank you, God!"

  I leaned over and asked in a low voice, "Gen, are you sure you aren't really a great big Dixie in disguise?"

  "Ha! Let's just say I left my wings in my other suit."

  "What suit?"

  ❖

  Think I laid it on too thick, Dadday? Little Magic asked mentally after Toméz and the boys had trooped out.

  "Nope. It was perfect. Loved the wings, by the way."

  It took a lot of Quintessence to manifest that way, Dadday. I'll be delayed again.

  "What about... you know, the Waykan thing?"

  Sounding sleepy, he told me, I know what I'll do now, Dadday, and how. His voice started to fade. I am very tired... wake me when you get to Hamiltown.

  I couldn't help it; I half-smiled as a grin tugged at the corner of my right lip. "You can bet on it, kid."

  Love you, Father.

  "Love you too, son."

  It was only after I said it, and after his presence had faded from my mind, that I realized it was the first time Eos had ever told me he loved me. Suddenly I was gripped with a paralyzing fear, worried that after he disobeyed Aurora and saved the Waykan children, I would never see or hear from him again.

  I told myself that his Mother was too good a Goddess to ever end him, no matter how angry she was. But my mind wasn't convinced, especially when I remembered all the Greco-Roman mythology Young-Father Trent had taught me, and it was hours before I settled down enough to go back to my planning.

  Chapter Ten

  A week later, our army set out from East Gate, headed in the direction of Hamiltown. We were planning to go straight across the post-oak savannah this time, to see if we couldn't find more minotaur tribes in an effort to add them to our commonwealth. We'd also treat with any other dimensional travelers we encountered—except for Alfas. We'd use the female elements of our army to capture Alfas alive, if we could, release all their slaves, and then have the Elves impregnate the Alfas before we released them. Hopefully that would provide them with the first "wild" Elves. If they looked like they'd be too much for us to handle, we'd convert them the way Toméz had converted his kidnappers. I figured it would work, Goddess willing.

  Speaking of which, I decided about then that I really had to have a talk with the Goddess about, well, being a Goddess. By now, Little Magic and I had made enough little slips that Toméz and the Elves should have figured out their deity actually preferred to be female, and appeared to everyone else as such.

  But I digress. The army wasn't large, but it was larger than Hamiltown's, at 250 individuals. Of course, 30 of those were cobber sappers and engineers, and all the Hero Dixies came except Gray and Apollo, who would be taking on the task of organizing and controlling the new Dixies when they were born. I was expecting maybe 600 or so, or 700 if we were lucky, but the two hero Dixies should be able to handle them with the help of the olbytla and faunlets. We were also accompanied by half the Elves, who had become ardent converts of the small-race method of reproduction once they'd experienced it. They had all wanted to go, but I had three of them stay so they could feed my succubus wives, who were both within a month of giving birth, and two other succubi who had recently emigrated, since I couldn't. It didn't take much convincing.

  The rest of my army consisted of women who could ride horses, mostly pooka and terran, with a giant and a faunlet in each of the two wagons to put together the mangonels, fire them if necessary, and look menacing. Montana was one of the giants; Coulter also came along, since it would be a few months yet before our son Saul was born, and she was quite bored.

  Meanwhile, 20 greeps, 26 sheep, and 34 pigs were trussed to stakes in a sturdy compound three miles west of Icarus Township, impregnated with pixie eggs from our romps with the 80 small ladies, and watched over round-the-clock by faunlets and terran men who had special wax-and-fabric earplugs to wear once the animals' agony got too loud. I felt guilty just to have assigned them the duty, not to mention having to sacrifice the livestock in such a painful manner. Especially during my visit the day before we left. Until then, I had no idea a greep could vocalize at all, much less shriek continuously for more than a minute.

  I did not sleep well that night.

  As it turned out, Hamiltown wasn't that far away when you didn't follow the river or make many stops. We didn't run into any minotaur herds, though we saw their sign in the form of vast swaths of mown grass; and any other people who saw us stayed away. We'd catch up with the tauras if necessary after we dealt with Hamiltown. To keep busy, we hunted deer and jackalope, and took every chupacrabra we saw. They were nasty little bloodsuckers, but their leather was wonderfully tough and naturally hairless.

  I began to get a little worried when I saw the burned-out areas as we approached my old village. Five or six miles out, the buildings and overgrown lots of the Greater Palestina suburbs had been burnt out in many places. I doubted the burnouts had been caused by wildfires, as the year had been wet thus far. I could think of no reason why the people of Hamiltown would have done the burning, because some of the buildings had still been structurally sound, and they didn't need the arable land yet. I knew something was definitely wrong when we started hitting the village's agricultural fields at a mile or so out, and there was nothing there but burnt stubble. The farmers sometimes burned over fields post-harvest to help fertilize the lands, but it was mid-April. We had also burned our crops, once or twice, to keep raiders from getting them. That had resulted in lean winters, but we had survived.

  When the Hamiltown palisade came into sight, I had to stop myself from kicking my horse into a flat-out run. The huge scorch marks on the gate and surrounding logs were readily visible even nearly half a mile away. But the palisade and gate seemed sound, and were not revealed to be otherwise as we continued our approach. The guard-post a quarter-mile from the village gate had, however, been burned and razed; and that was a bad sign, because it was a stupid thing to do in the post-Ruin world, which still crawled with "wild" and belligerent dimensional travelers and terran bandits.

  I brought my army to a halt about a hundred yards from the gates, and saw to my astonishment that there was no one on the walls manning them. No one! That was something new; the Homeguard would have never dared allow such a thing when I was resident. We'd been attacked by bandits many times, and the "demons," as we'd called the dimensional travelers (and as they no doubt still did) were always coming around to try to tempt our men out to a life of free and easy sex. Sometimes they succeeded.

  I couldn't imagine that no one had seen or heard us coming. After waiting for perhaps ten minutes, I shrugged, then pulled forward to about fifty yards and shouted, "Hello the village! Hamiltown, you have visitors!"

  That, at least, got me an arrow in the chest. But the bastard Alfa quartermasters from whom we'd wrested the former Scarborough Faire had, among other things, hoarded whole wagon-loads of body armor made from a tough composite called Kevlar, and I had plates of it sewn into my leather armor. The arrow just bounced off, the stone point shattering. It did hole my spanking new Commonwealth tabard, bright argent emblazoned with a pixie, gules, that had been hand-made by Coulter just days before. That rather pissed me off.

  "Puck!" I shouted. "Put a hardened pellet through that arrow slit!"

  "Sir yes sir!"

  Still mounted, she aimed and fired from sixty yards away. The thunk of her air gun was followed immediately by a scream: "My eye! My eye!"

  I grinned. What idiot peers through an arrow slit after shooting at someone? I hoped it was one of the bullies who had plagued my childhood. I hadn't enjoyed being called the ironic "Moby Toby" and more descriptive "Teenie Weenie" because of my late puberty.

>   When another arrow bounced off my cuirass, I got a little more irritated and thundered, "HOW DARE YOU FIRE UPON FELL TOBIAS!" My voice literally thundered, echoing back off the walls and the distant trees along the Trinidad, so apparently I had a little Divine help. I gestured at Puck to put a shot through this second arrow slit, which she did, but there was no ensuing scream. Flashing the hand signal that told her to reload with marbles, I called out, "Show yourself, cowards!"

  A moment later, four men whose heads had been shaved except for ugly topknots rose into view on the guard platforms right and left of the gate, two on either side. They wore feathers dangling from their topknots, and had colorful vertical stripes either painted or tattooed on their faces (I would later learn that they were tattooed badges of rank). Gopherwood earrings hung from their ears, and a couple had grotesquely stretched their lobes with earspools. I had to admire their bravery; though they were out of ordinary bowshot of my army, I'd already proven I had something that could strike farther when I had Puck respond to their own arrow at myself. Of course, they knew nothing of my wife Montana's ballista, and I doubt they had any idea of the nature of the siege machines the other giant and the faunlets were assembling.

  Before I could demand who they were, the tallest and most brightly ornamented man shouted, "Who are you? And how dare you bring an army to the gates of the Tejarkán Emperor's village of Hibernia!"

  I shouted back, "If you'd listened earlier, you'd know who I am! And seriously, Hibernia? You renamed Hamiltown after an old banking chain?"

  The fashion plate shouted back, "Answer me, species traitor!"

  That accusation made me stop and think. It took me a moment to realize that, apparently, the Tejarkanye still considered DTs monsters, or at least alien species. But now was not the time to educate them on reality. I shouted back, "I am called Fell Tobias, and I am the leader and All-Father of the Commonwealth of Icarus, centered seven days' travel due west! Does the man known as Old-Father Trenton Darius the Elder still dwell among you?"

  After a brief conference with someone below whose voice was half-familiar to me, the Tejarkanye spokesman shouted back, "He does!"

  "Pray bring him forward — tell him his son has a message for him!"

  "And why should I do that, barbarian?"

  My whole army gasped as almost one being, and I heard Pucky shout, "Oh no you did not!" How dare a Mongol/Comanche wannabe call us barbarians!

  I replied haughtily, "Because he needs to know something in order to save your miserable hides, not to mention the entire village. Tell him exactly this: 'Willie Pete still burns'."

  "WHAT!?" I heard a high-pitched voice squawk, and I half-grinned. That was Old-Father Trent, all right. I could hear a ruckus inside the gate and I could just imagine him elbowing his way through a crowd to get to the front. "Who the hell are you!?"

  "It's Toby, Dad."

  "Oh yeah? And what did you find when you were 20 at the landfill mine?"

  "A plastic bag full of Penthouse magazines, Dad."

  "So you did. And you claim Willie Pete still burns? Despite the fact that other high-energy reactions no longer work?"

  "Yes, Dad." I raised my voice so all could hear, and shouted, "Now, Old-Father Trent, kindly explain to these morons what a kilogram of finely-divided burning white phosphorus, scatter-shot into the village using a long-range mangonel, would do to Hamiltown!"

  "THIS IS HIS MAJESTY'S VILLAGE OF HIBERNIA, BARBARIAN!" the Tejarkanye leader screamed, and I sighed.

  Turning to look at Puck, I called, "Two in the forehead, please ma'am."

  Thunk thunk went the air-gun, thock crunch went the fashion plate's head, and he fell bonelessly off the platform to the hard ground below with a sickening thud. In the dead silence that followed, I called, "Now, will someone a little more reasonable listen to what my father has to say?"

  The next-brightest savage (at least color-wise) descended the ladder to the ground. There followed a muttered conference between him and Old-Father Trent that included a number of shouts of disbelief before the new Tejarkanye spokesman rose above the ladder and said flatly, "I call bullshit. Our scientists have made it clear that high-energy reactions, whether chemical or nuclear, no longer work. Now leave, before we send a pigeon to Tejarkán and your little barbarian 'nation' has to deal with the full might of the Emperor's army!"

  It was getting toward evening, which helped. I looked back to see Petra flashing me a thumbs-up; her Vixens had the mangonel assembled and loaded. "You want some proof?" I called. "Okay, you asked for it." I made an overhand motion, and I heard the twang of released tension as the giantess Soren yanked out the mangonel's rod. A small luminium canister spun into the air over Hamiltown—oh, excuse me, Hibernia—and, at the height of its arc, burst into pure white flame, flaring as bright as the sun. A little parachute popped out, and the flare drifted slowly toward the ground as people screamed, shouted, and apparently ran. The gates of the town vibrated as though something stupid, say a panicked crowd, had crashed into them.

  After sending a group to put out the flare once it hit the ground, the new Tejarkanye commander shouted to me, "What do you want, self-styled Fell Tobias?"

  "Hey, it wasn't me who named me that, it was the Dawn Goddess, my ally and lover," I called brightly, and noted that he seemed shaken at that statement. "And didn't I say? Damn, I'm getting forgetful in my old age. I came to conquer Hamiltown and bring my family home to Icarus Township, but now I think I'll just conquer 'Hibernia' and add it to my 'little barbarian nation'." I made sure he noticed the air-quotes. Then I turned to Puck and her two chosen faunlet markswomen, Titania and Ariel, and said in a disgusted tone, "Double-tap all three of the Tejarkanye."

  The six shots were so closely timed they sounded like a single double-thunk, and Tejarkanye foreheads broke with satisfying squishy sounds before they fell backward off the walls. I shouted, "Any more of those painted idiots, Dad?"

  "Nope!"

  "Then will someone sequester the collaborators and open this damned gate? I have something pressing I need you all for."

  After that, my former townsmen couldn't open the gates fast enough. Most still held back; after all, I was supposed to be dead. I had been declared so in the Formula of Exile almost a year ago, and there was a tombstone with my name on it on Boot Hill on the other side of the town. Old-Father Trent emerged first, flanked by Ezra Simms and Russ Anders, both of whom held stout longbows of a type Hamiltown had never used before. I suspected they had been taken from the Tejarkanye and their allies.

  "It is you!" Old-Father said, hurrying the last few feet to catch me up in his arms, tears on his cheeks.

  "Yes sir," I replied, tears of my own blurring the world. "I might have been a bit violent there at the end, but I was never a liar, was I?" I held him out at arm's length. "About hurting Cally Yoder..."

  "Turns out it was justified," he said quickly.

  "Maybe it was. But the reason I was edgy enough that I snapped was... well, testosterone poisoning, I suppose. I was entering puberty with a vengeance."

  He stared at me for a moment, and then burst into laughter. "How deliciously ironic!"

  "Isn't it? I want you to meet a small part of my family." I turned back to the army "Coulter! Montana! Dixies, front and center!"

  A swirl of wings surrounded me, the boys talking over each other as usual. "Aye aye, mon capitán!" "Reporting in, Dad!" "Right-o, Daddio!" "How can we help, Pops?" "Who's the old man, Old Man?"

  "Attention, Hero Dixies!" Instantly, the boys popped to, saluting, in a precise little line and fortunately in alphabetical order. "Dixies, this is one of the men who raised me, Old-Father Trenton Darius the Elder. You've heard me speak of him. Dad, these are six of my eight eldest sons: Bellerophon, Chaos, Dionysus, Eros, Filotus, and Hermes. Apollo and Gration are at home, organizing our latest recruits."

  Don't forget me, Dadday, a little boy's voice echoed in my head, and I could tell Old-Father Trent had heard it when his eyes widened.

  "A
nd that," I said gravely, "is my first conceived son, who has not yet been born. His mother is the Dawn Goddess Aurora. I suppose you could call him a demigod. His true name is Eos, but I call him Little Magic."

  "Did... did you say sons? But they're pixies! And the Goddess...?"

  "It's a long story, Dad," I assured him. "But the short version is, I'm so fertile I can impregnate women of all human races—and they are human—but I only produce male children."

  Montana and Coulter joined us then, and it was obvious that both were with child. I said quietly to the older man, whom I realized was looking much older than when I'd left him last year, "Dad, these are two of my wives, and the mothers of my unborn children. The giantess is Montana; Coulter is the centaur." Montana bowed at the waist, and Coulter did her complex centaur curtsy as Father stared. "Ladies, this is one of my fathers, Trenton Darius the Elder."

  "We are charmed to meet our husband and king's father," Coulter said gallantly.