Suddenly, his voice grew sweet, persuasive, tempting: "Why do we have to quarrel at all, Gradi goddess? You can be pleasing to the eye when it suits you; I sense as much. Why not lie with me in love? Once you know what proper pleasure is, you'll feel less attracted toward death and doom and ice." He began to play on his pipes, a tune a shepherd might have used to lure a goose girl to a secluded meadow on a warm summer evening.
But Voldar was no goose girl, and Gradihome knew nothing of warmth. "You cannot seduce me from my purpose, foreign god. May your lust curdle and freeze; may your ardor wither."
"I am ardor," Mavrix said, "nothing else but, and I kindle it in others. I would try even in you, to teach you somewhat of the ways of existence about which, it would seem, you now know nothing."
"I told you, I am not your receptacle." Voldar's voice grew sharp. "Leave Gradihome now and you will suffer nothing further. If you stay, you will learn the consequences of your folly."
"I am folly," Mavrix said, in the same tone of voice he had used to declare himself ardor. Gerin thought he meant the one as much as the other. Ardor, to his way of thinking, certainly engendered folly. Maybe that was what the god had had in mind.
"You are a fool, that certainly." Voldar spoke as Gerin might have while chiding a vassal for something stupid he'd done. "Very well. If you will be a fool, you will pay for it." Raising her great axe, she advanced on Mavrix.
All the Sithonian tales of the fertility god named him an arrant coward. The Fox had seen some of that himself. He more than half expected Mavrix to run away from that determined, menacing advance. Instead, though, Mavrix jeered, "Are you truly a battleaxe, Voldar, or just after my spear?" That part of him leaped, leaving Voldar in no possible doubt of his meaning.
She snarled something Gerin didn't understand, which was probably just as well. Then she swung the axe with a stroke any of the warriors who worshiped her would have been proud to claim as his own. Gerin wondered what would have happened had that blow landed as she intended. His best guess was that the Sithonian pantheon would have wanted a new deity.
But the blow did not land. Mavrix's phallus was not all that had leaped. He used his wand to bat the axehead aside. The thyrsus looked as if it would break at such usage, but looks, when it came to gods and their implements, were apt to be deceiving.
Voldar evidently had been deceived. She shouted in fury at finding herself thwarted. "There, there," Mavrix said in syrupy, soothing tones, and reach out to pat her-not at all consolingly-on her bare backside. Gerin couldn't tell whether his arm had got long to let him do that, or whether he'd shifted his position in some way allowed to gods but not men and then returned in an instant to where he had been.
However he'd done it, it made Voldar even angrier than she had been already. Her next cut with that axe would have left Mavrix metaphorically spearless. Again, he used the wand to turn aside the stroke, though Gerin, perched there on the edge of his consciousness, felt the effort that had required. Mavrix was not a god of war, where Voldar seemed to exist for no other purpose than conquest and subjugation.
"Are you going to be able to hold out against her?" he asked the Sithonian god. The question had immediate practical import for him. If Voldar beat Mavrix, would his own spirit be trapped here in Gradihome? He was hard-pressed to imagine a gloomier fate.
"We'll find out, won't we?" Mavrix answered, not the most reassuring reply the Fox could have got.
He quickly became convinced Mavrix was overmatched. The Sithonian god was indeed no killer; he sought to provoke Voldar, to infuriate her, to drive her to distraction. She, by contrast, was grimly intent on harming him-on destroying him, if she could.
The longer they struggled, the more Gerin grew concerned she could do exactly as she intended. This was not a struggle of the same sort as Mavrix had had with the other Gradi gods. It put the Fox more in mind of some of the desperate fights he'd had on the battlefield, ferocious brawls with anything past the notion of bare survival forgotten. Voldar and Mavrix hammered and pounded and cursed each other, the curses landing as heavily and painfully as kicks and buffets.
When Mavrix squeezed her, Voldar would for a moment weaken and lean toward him as if intending an embrace: the struggle was, in some ways, a spectacularly violent attempt at a seduction. But Voldar never really came close to yielding, however much Gerin wished and hoped she would. She had her own purposes, which were not those of Mavrix.
And when she gained the upper hand for the time being, the Fox felt Mavrix's nature changing into something harder and colder than seemed fitting for the Sithonian god. Voldar, he realized, was trying to bend Mavrix to her will no less than he her to his. Those stretches came more and more often as the battle progressed. Gerin wondered if Mavrix realized as much himself, and if he should warn the god.
Suddenly Mavrix gave a great cry-not of pain but of rejection-and broke away from Voldar. The disengagement was not like that between two struggling humans. One instant, he was locked in the fight with the Gradi goddess, the next he stood at the edge of the clearing in which she had awaited him.
"No," he said hoarsely. "You shall not make me into something you can rule." He understood the stakes, then. "I will not allow it. I do not allow it."
"If you stay here, I shall," Voldar said. "This is Gradihome, and Gradihome is mine." She strode toward the Sithonian fertility god, implacable purpose on her face and in every line of her body.
Mavrix broke and fled. Voldar's harsh, mocking laughter rang in his ears as he dashed away, snow flying up under his sandal-clad feet. "Be careful," Gerin shouted in his metaphysical ear. "Don't fall into Nothing's lair again."
Mavrix swerved aside, off the path. The fierce wolves of the home of the Gradi gods came coursing after him, but fawned like friendly pups once more when they drew near: so much of his power, at least, he still retained. And then he was on the path again, and running faster than ever. "I thank you for reminding me of the trap," he said, "though I do not thank you for involving me in this misadventure in the first place."
"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 finally 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 hea
d 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.
Tale of the Fox gtf-2 Page 24
