Tale of the Fox gtf-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Gerin smiled. "There are times when I wish I could send Dagref down to the City of Elabon to learn all the things he can't learn here in the northlands. Maybe you should go, too, for that's reasoned like a scholar."

  "Aye, so it is," Van rumbled, "but there's more going on here than scholarship or whatever you call it. It's not just the weather, lad. It's what I feel in the hair on the nape of my neck, and I'm not talking about lice." He set a hand on the flared neckpiece of his helmet.

  "What do we do about it?" Duren said, yielding the point.

  "Fight it," Van declared. As usual, the world looked simple to him.

  Gerin wished the world looked simple to him, too. Here, though, he saw no better answer than the one his friend had proposed.

  * * *

  By the time they camped, that first night west of the Venien, the Trokmoi were all edgy, looking over their shoulders and muttering to themselves over anything or nothing. The presence of the more stolid Elabonians seemed to steady them, as Gerin-and Adiatunnus-had hoped it would.

  They were still in land under Gerin's suzerainty, but not land where his control was as firm as it was closer to Fox Keep. The serfs hereabouts had not seen enough of him and his armies to have any confidence in their goodwill. They probably had seen enough of Trokm- raiders to have no confidence in them whatever. At first sight of a large force heading their way, they fled into the woods.

  The warriors took-even Gerin did not like to think of it as stealing-enough chickens and sheep to sacrifice to keep the night ghosts quiet. Other than that, they did not harm the villages or the fields around them. They built great bonfires not only to hold the ghosts at bay but also to give themselves warning if the Gradi were close enough to dare a night attack.

  To reduce the risk of that as much as he could, Gerin set scouts out all around the campsite, each small group with a fowl to offer so the ghosts would not trouble them in spite of their being away from the fires. Adiatunnus watched that with interest and attention; the Fox got the idea the Trokm- was storing the notion to use against him one of these years.

  Swift-moving Tiwaz had come round close to first quarter. Math was almost full, while Nothos, though four days past, still had only a bit of his eastern edge abraded by darkness. Out where the light of the bonfires grew dim, men had three separate shadows, each pointing in a different direction.

  Except to go out to stand sentry or to answer calls of nature, though, few men, either Elabonians or Trokmoi, strayed far from the fireside. The warriors either rolled up in their blankets or sat around talking, often with folk not of their own kin. Most of them understood and could speak at least some of the language of their hereditary foes, and most relished the chance to swap tales with the men they usually met with weapons, not words.

  Drungo Drago's son turned to Van and said, "Give us a tale, why don't you?"

  Instantly, all the Elabonians began clamoring for a tale from the outlander, too. He'd seen and done things none of them, Gerin included, could match, and he told a good story, too. Seeing how enthusiastic the Elabonians were to hear him, the Trokmoi started shouting, too.

  "Well, all right," Van said at last. "I thought I'd sooner sleep, and I thought a lot of you would sooner sleep, too, but who knows? Maybe I'll put you to sleep and then get some myself. You'd like that, hey?"

  Somebody threw a hard-baked biscuit at him. He caught it out of the air and went on without missing a beat: "Well, I've yarned a good deal about creatures of one kind or another I've seen, and those tales haven't had too many people flinging their suppers my way, so maybe I'll give you one of them just to stay safe. How does that sound?"

  No one said no. Several warriors said yes, loudly and enthusiastically. Van nodded. "All right, then," he said. "South and east of the City of Elabon, way south of the High Kirs, the coast of the Bay of Parvela runs southeast between Kizzuwatna, which is far away from here and hot as you please, to Mabalal, which is even farther, even hotter, and muggy to boot." He looked around. The night, like the day, was cooler than it should have been. "Feels good to think about something hot right now, doesn't it?"

  His listeners nodded. Gerin wished he could put into a jar whatever his friend used to draw an audience into a story. Even if it wasn't sorcery, it was magic of a sort.

  Van went on, "Some of you, now, some of you may have heard I had to get out of Mabalal in a kind of a hurry once upon a time." He got more nods, from a few of the Trokmoi and a lot of the Elabonians. He grinned; his teeth flashed white in the firelight. "By the gods, some of you have heard a whole raft of different reasons why I had to get out of Mabalal in a hurry. Now does that mean I get into a pack of trouble or I tell a pack of lies?"

  "Both, most likely," Drungo said. He wasn't a match for Van in size or strength or speed, but he was a large, strong man, and confident of his prowess. Even so, he made sure he was grinning, too.

  The outlander, busy shaping his story, didn't take it for a challenge, as he might have in his younger days. He just said, "Well, I was there, and I'm the only one here who was, so nobody'll prove anything on me, and that's a fact. Anyway, there I was, sailing away from Mabalal up toward Kizzuwatna, getting away from whatever I was getting away from, and we put in at this miserable little port called Sirte.

  "There's only two reasons anybody would ever put in at Sirte. One is, you can fill your waterskins there. The water you get is harsh, and it can give you a flux of the bowels if you're not used to it, but the spring never fails. And the other is that, a ways inland, there's a grove of myrrh trees in a valley that some more springs water. If you can get the myrrh, which is a sticky resin that grows on the trees, you'll sell it for a goodly price."

  "It's one of the incenses they burn at Ikos, isn't it?" Gerin put in.

  "That it is, Fox." Van nodded. "When we got to Sirte, maybe half of dozen of us-ne'er-do-wells every one, you'd say-we decided to see if we couldn't get hold of some of this myrrh for our own selves, and strike out inland to see what we could do with it. I don't know about the others, but me, I was sick of being cooped up on a ship.

  "The folk at Sirte spoke some of the language of Mabalal, and so did we. When they got the drift of what we wanted to do, they told us to watch out for snakes on the way to the myrrh trees. We'd just come out of Mabalal, now, so we thought we knew something of snakes-I've told stories about the serpents there, I expect."

  "I liked the yarn about the snake with the stone in its head that was supposed to make you turn invisible, but didn't," Parol Chickpea said.

  "For which I do thank you, friend," Van said. "Aye, we thought we knew something of snakes, that we did, so when the folk of Sirte warned us of the kinds they had out there in their desert-the chersidos and the cenchris and the seps and the prester and the dipsas and the scytale and I don't know what all other sorts they named-we just nodded our heads and said `Yes, yes' when they told us about the different kinds of venom the serpents had. We figured they were spinning tales to frighten us and make us stay away from the myrrh."

  The outlander shook his head. The firelight deepened the lines that carved his face and exaggerated his expression of rue. "Only goes to show what we knew, or rather, what we didn't. We bought waterskins and filled 'em and trudged out into the desert toward the myrrh trees, which were about a day and a half's travel inland from Sirte. The local folk shook their heads watching us go, as if they didn't expect to see us ever again, which, truth to tell, they probably didn't. To this day, if they remember us, they probably think we all perished in the desert. Lucky we are that we didn't-or some of us didn't, too."

  "I suppose the people of Sirte went back and forth to the myrrh trees every so often," Gerin said. "If they looked for the snakes to get you, wouldn't they have expected to find your bodies along whatever trail there was?"

  "That's a good question, Captain, and before I trod that trail I would have thought the same thing," Van said, "that is, if I'd believed them about the snakes, which I can't say I did. Like I told you, my notio
n was that they were just trying to scare us and keep us from going after the myrrh. I mean… well, hear me out and you'll see.

  "We'd been walking along for a bit when all of a sudden something reared up out of the sand and gravel and hit me a lick right here." The outlander tapped his left greave, not far below the knee. "If I hadn't been wearing it, there's an awful lot of stories I wouldn't have told since, and that's the truth.

  "I took a whack at the snake with my sword, and off flew its head. But we'd stirred up more than one, it turned out. Maybe the second was mate to the first. I won't ever know that. I killed it, too, but not till after it bit one of my friends.

  "It wasn't a very big snake, and we hoped it wasn't any of the kinds the locals had warned us about, but it turned out to be a seps, and oh" — Van covered his eyes with a hand- "how I wish it hadn't been."

  "How do you know it was, if it was only a little snake you killed?" someone asked.

  "By the action of the venom," Van answered. "The seps bit my friend-well, actually, he was a robber and a thief, but we were traveling together-just above the ankle. Half an hour later, the gods beshrew me if I lie, there was nothing left of him but a little puddle of greenish fluid."

  "What?" that same somebody exclaimed. "A snakebite doesn't do that."

  "I thought the same thing," Van said, "but I was wrong. The natives at Sirte had told us the seps' venom made you disappear, and they knew what they were talking about. The fellow's flesh got clear around the bite, so you could see the bone through it, and then it just melted away, and the bone with it." He shuddered dramatically. "I never saw a man dissolve before and, if the gods are kind, I'll never see it again. How he screamed as he watched himself vanish-till he couldn't scream any more, of course. The rest of us, we pushed on in a hurry, let me tell you, and by the time we got out of there, like I say, he was nothing more than a little, stinking puddle the hot sun was already drying up.

  "You can't blame us for not sticking around the spot where anything that horrible happened, but running away so fast turned out to be a mistake, too, for we didn't watch where we were putting our feet as carefully as we should have, and one of us stepped right on a prester.

  "The thing looked like the vipers they have here, more or less, but when it came writhing out of the sand, it was the color of melted copper. It sank its teeth into poor Nasid-that was his name; it comes back to me even after all these years-then dove back into the sandbank and disappeared before anybody could do anything to it.

  "And poor Nasid! Instead of melting, he started to swell, like rising bread dough but a hundred times as fast. His skin turned as fiery red as the prester's. He looked like there was a storm inside him, puffing him out every which way at once.

  "Here's how fast he blew out: he was wearing trousers and a tunic with buttons, almost Trokm-style, and the buttons flew right off the tunic, so hard that the one that hit me gave me this little scar over my eye, right here." The outlander pointed to a mark on his much-battered hide.

  Gerin admired that touch. If Van's stories weren't true, they should have been, for he adorned them with a wealth of circumstantial detail. "What happened then?" the Fox asked.

  "What do you mean?" Van returned. "To Nasid? He exploded, and there was no more left of him than of the other poor devil. To the rest of us? We ran. We probably should have run back to Sirte, but we went on toward the myrrh instead, and actually got to it with nobody else dying on the way. Then we headed up toward the Shanda country, but my other three friends-friends? ha! — tried to kill me for my share of the myrrh, and I left them as dead as anybody a snake bit."

  "And what would the moral o' the tale be?" Adiatunnus asked. "A fine one it is, but it should have a moral."

  "You want a moral, eh?" Van said. "I'll give you one. What this story shows is, some things are more trouble than they're worth."

  The Trokm- chieftain laughed and nodded. "It does that. And a truth worth remembering it is, too." He glanced up at the moons. "And if you'd gone on much longer, the story'd have been more trouble nor it was worth, with us having to get up in the morning and all. But you didna, for which I thank you." He laid a blanket on the ground and wrapped himself in it.

  Gerin couldn't resist a parting shot: "Even if you do get up in the morning, will you be moving before afternoon?" Adiatunnus made a point of ignoring him. Chuckling, the Fox also swaddled himself in a blanket and was soon asleep.

  * * *

  Maybe sleeping in the open was what the Trokmoi needed. Maybe they were starting to remember what being on campaign was all about. Whatever the reason, they moved reasonably fast when the sun came up the next morning. Gerin had been looking forward to screaming at them to hurry. Disappointed, he gnawed dry sausage and made sure he was ready to get going so they couldn't twit him.

  The farther west they traveled, the more heavily the unnatural coolth lay on the land. Gerin eyed the fields with curiosity and concern mixed. "They'll not have much of a crop this year," he observed.

  "Aye, the wheat's well behind where it ought to be," Van agreed. "They look like they had to plant late to start with, and they won't make up for lost time, not with weather like this they won't." His shiver held only a little exaggeration for dramatic effect.

  "Pity you couldn't have brought one of those prester snakes along with you from Sirte-is that the name of the place?" Gerin said. Van nodded. The Fox went on, "Sounds like just what we'd need to heat up… a certain goddess I'd be better off not naming."

  Van chuckled and nodded. "Aye, a prester would heat her up if anything would. The thing of it is, would anything?"

  "I don't know and I don't care," Gerin answered. "If we beat the Gradi and drive them away, it doesn't matter, anyhow. Without men and women to worship her, that goddess won't gain a foothold here."

  He didn't know whether not naming Voldar would do any good. But he'd been of the opinion that Adiatunnus knew more about the Gradi than he did, and the Trokm- chief had given him no reason to change his mind. If Adiatunnus thought saying Voldar's name would draw her notice, the Fox was willing to refrain.

  He wished, though, that he could draw the notice of the local barons by speaking their names. Many of them seemed to have abandoned their keeps, though the Gradi didn't seem to be garrisoning those keeps, either. Some of the serf villages looked deserted, too. Again, Gerin saw the delicate fabric of civilization tearing.

  He sent scouts out farther ahead and to either side than he was used to doing. He also maintained a substantial rearguard: the Gradi, with their ability to travel down rivers, were liable to try to set troops behind him and pin him between two forces. He would have thought about doing that had he been in their place, anyhow.

  As his army advanced through country that lay ever deeper in the frigid embrace of the Gradi gods, he wished he could come to grips with the Gradi themselves. He began to worry when he encountered none of them, and started complaining shortly thereafter.

  When he did, Van fixed him with a gaze that might have belonged on a battlefield itself and said, "We'll come across them soon enough, and when we do, you'll be wishing just as loud you'd never set eyes on them." Since that was undoubtedly true, the Fox maintained what he thought was a prudent silence. Van's snicker said it might have been less prudent than he'd hoped.

  And then, a couple of days later, the army did come upon a troop of Gradi; the invaders were happily plundering a peasant village. They'd killed a couple of men, and a line of them were having sport with a woman they'd caught. They seemed utterly astonished to find foes so far into territory they obviously thought of as theirs. As some of them were literally caught with their breeches down, they put up a fight less ferocious than they might have otherwise, and several made no effort to slay themselves rather than submitting to capture.

  Gerin ordered the men who'd been holding down the peasant woman and the one who'd been on top of her bound and handed over to the surviving serfs. "Do as you like with them," he said. "I'm sure you'll think of somethin
g interesting."

  The peasants' eyes glowed. "Let's get a fire going," one of them said.

  "Aye, and we'll boil some water over it," another added enthusiastically.

  "Will we want sharp knives-or dull ones?" somebody asked.

  "Both," said the woman who'd been raped. "I claim first cut, and I know just where I'm going to make it, too." She stared at the crotch of one of the Gradi with an interest anything but lewd. Gerin couldn't tell whether any of the bound Gradi understood Elabonian. They might not know what was in store for them. He shrugged. If they didn't, they'd find out soon enough.

  One of the other northerners did speak the language of the land they'd invaded. "I not tell you anything," he said when Gerin started to question him.

  "Fine," the Fox said. He turned to the warriors holding the captives. "Take him where he can watch the serfs at work. If he doesn't come back talkier after that, we'll give him to them, too."

  "Come on, you," one of the Elabonians said. They frogmarched the Gradi away. Before long, the Fox heard hoarse screams rising up from inside the village. When the guards brought the Gradi back, his face was paler than it had been. The guards looked grim, too.

  "Hello again," Gerin said briskly. He looked thoughtful, a look he'd had occasion to practice over the years. "Do you suppose your goddess would be interested in keeping you around for the afterlife if you end up dead with some interesting parts missing? Do you suppose you'd enjoy the afterlife as much if you didn't have them? Do you want to find out the answers to those questions right away?"

  The Gradi licked his lips. He didn't answer right away; maybe he was taking stock of his own spirit. Dying in battle, even slaying yourself to avoid capture, seemed easy if you measured them against mutilation that would be long agony in this world and might ruin you for the next.

  Gerin smiled. "Are you more in the mood to talk now than you were a little while ago? For your sake, you'd better be."

  "How I know I talk, then you do things to me anyway?" the Gradi asked.