Fox and Empire

by Harry Turtledove

  "Good," Aragis said briskly, and Gerin nodded. "Say on, Sandifer." The Archer glanced at the Fox and shrugged a small shrug, acknowledging that this business concerned both of them.

  Sandifer said, "Lord, uh, kings, he's going to give you ten days to disperse your forces, or else there will be war: voluminous war, I heard him say, whatever that means."

  "It means he talks like a southerner," Gerin said. "They like to throw in a fancy word every now and then, whether they use it the right way or not."

  "I heard that," Rihwin called.

  "If they want volumes of war," Aragis said, ignoring Rihwin (as did Gerin), "we'll give them enough to fill the Fox's library."

  That wasn't using voluminous the right way, either, but Gerin was not inclined to undertake literary criticism on his fellow king's utterances. "If it comes to war-no, when it comes to war," he said, " do you aim to go back into your keeps and make the Empire dig you out one castle at a time?"

  "Only if I have to," Aragis answered at once. "If I were fighting the imperials alone, I might do that, for they'd have far more strength than I do by myself. But they'd ravage the countryside, so that even beating them back now might mean losing to you next year. My lands shield yours here, you'll notice."

  "That's what you get for living south of me." Gerin scratched his head. Aragis could see that having the Elabonian Empire devastate his territory would weaken him to the point where he'd have trouble withstanding the Fox. He wasn't stupid, nor anything close to it. But the idea that he was doing to his own lands over the course of years what the Empire would do in a single campaigning season had never entered his mind. It wasn't immediately apparent, and so wasn't there at all for him.

  The Archer said, "With you beside me, Fox, I aim to fight those imperial bastards as hard as I can and as far south as I can. One thing I will say about you: now that you've said you will fight alongside me, I don't think you'll turn on me instead of the Empire. There are others in the northlands to whom I'd not trust my back."

  Gerin bowed slightly. When it came to judging how things ran in the short term, Aragis was as good as anyone he'd ever know-as good as he was, probably. Could he trust Aragis at his back? The only answer he could come up with was… sometimes. He said, "Knowing which enemy to pick counts for a good deal."

  "Oh, indeed." Aragis bared his teeth in one of his alarming smiles. "Did I not rely on you to understand the Elabonian Empire was more dangerous to both of us than we are to each other? Did I not put my life in your hands on that understanding and no more?"

  "You did." Gerin wondered whether he would have done that in reverse if, say, the Gradi had been on the point of beating him five years earlier. Maybe. Maybe not, too. Because Aragis lived so close to the here-and-now, every crisis was liable to seem a matter of life and death to him. Gerin was better at waiting than his hard-charging fellow king.

  "We cast defiance in the envoy's teeth, then, and smash the Empire's army on the battlefield." Aragis' eyes had a fierce falcon's glint in them, too. He believed every word of what he was saying. Maybe that would help him make his belief real. Maybe it would make him try to do more than he really could. Gerin shrugged. He'd find out soon.

  **

  When the chariot bearing the envoy of the Elabonian Empire and those in which his retinue rode came into view, Gerin felt-not for the first time since leaving Fox Keep-he'd fallen back in time through close to half his life. Not since his last trip down to the City of Elabon, more than twenty years before, had he seen men dressed in the flowing robes the imperials south of the High Kirs affected.

  Adiatunnus saw them, too, and did not know what to make of them. " Is the Empire after sending women to treat with us the now?" he asked, not quite in jest.

  "No, that's just their style down there," the Fox answered. "And they shave not only their cheeks and chins, the way you Trokmoi do, but their upper lips as well. I did it myself, when I lived down in the city."

  "But you had the sense to go back to a better way," Adiatunnus said.

  Gerin shrugged. "Sometimes different is just different, not better or worse."

  He looked around for Ferdulf. When he spied the little demigod, he waved for him to come over. Ferdulf came, looking suspicious. More often than not, Gerin was doing his best to make him go away. "What do you want?" Ferdulf growled.

  "See those fellows up ahead?" The Fox pointed. "That's the envoy from the Elabonian Empire and his friends."

  Ferdulf's lip curled in splendid scorn. "So? What do you want me to do about it? Miserable imperial-" His voice faded down into a scatological mumble.

  That was just what Gerin wanted. "They probably won't like you any better," he said with a grin he did not show: Ferdulf seemed to have forgotten he too was an Elabonian. "They're the ones who hold down Sithonia, after all."

  "I wonder what I can do to them," Ferdulf mused. Dagref looked back over his shoulder at Gerin. Gerin wished he hadn't done it; the look might have alerted Ferdulf to the notion that he was being manipulated. If Dagref did have to give Gerin a look, though, a look of approval was the one the Fox wanted. Dagref, as his father had learned to his own discomfiture, was better than anyone else at manipulating Ferdulf.

  Up came the Elabonian chariots. The one in the lead had a shield painted in green and white stripes mounted on the pole between the two horses: a shield of truce. That chariot and the one behind it pulled away from the rest and approached the army that had set out from Fox Keep. "I am Efilnath the Earnest," the fellow in the fanciest robe called, "commissioner to his majesty Crebbig I, Emperor of Elabon. I see here Aragis the Archer, who presumes to make the error of styling himself king. Rumor has it that others in the province are equally rash. Be any such others present, that I might treat with and dismiss all such false claimants simultaneously?"

  "I am Gerin the Fox," Gerin announced, "king of the north. I am here in alliance with Aragis. I note, Efilnath, that if you call claims false and say ahead of time you will dismiss them, you are not treating with those who make them, only disposing of them. I also note that they-and we-are not to be disposed of so readily."

  He wondered who Crebbig I was. On his last journey down to the City of Elabon, Hildor III had reigned there: an indolent excuse for a monarch. Whatever Crebbig's faults-and, being a man, he was bound to have them-indolence did not seem to be among their number.

  "As the Elabonian Empire does not recognize that this land has ever been anything but an imperial province, so naturally we cannot recognize any men styling themselves kings, save in recognizing them as rebels and traitors," Efilnath said.

  Aragis the Archer growled something angry under his breath. Gerin was about to growl something out loud when his eye chanced to fall on one of the men in the chariot behind Efilnath's. The fellow was nothing special to look at-not too tall, not too wide, not too handsome-and wore a robe that would have been altogether ordinary in the City of Elabon. Nonetheless, perhaps by the way he carried himself, perhaps by a certain look in his eye, Gerin knew him for what he was: a wizard from the Sorcerers' Collegium.

  And he recognized Gerin, too-not as an equal, as one who had completed the same arduous training, but as one who had some part of it. Those oddly compelling eyes of his widened, just a little; plainly, he had not expected to come across anyone in the northlands who shared even a fragment of his arcane expertise. Gerin understood that. The Elabonians south of the High Kirs reckoned the northlands a barbarous backwater. He knew they had a point, but not so much of one as they thought they did.

  He smiled at the wizard, a bleak display of acknowledgment and warning. The Elabonian got down from his chariot and hurried over to Efilnath's. He whispered in the envoy's ear. Whatever he said-and the Fox had a pretty good notion of what it would be-Efilnath seemed unimpressed. "Come what may, a backwoods baron remains a backwoods baron," he said, a distinct sniff in his voice.

  "Oh, Ferdulf," Gerin called sweetly, "come and say hello to these nice people, would you please?"

&nb
sp; "What nice people?" Ferdulf snarled. "All I see is a bunch of Elabonians who think they're smarter than they really are-idiots who think they're halfwits."

  As if his rumbling baritone wouldn't have been enough to alert the southerners that he was something out of the ordinary, he also strolled along a couple of feet off the ground. Efilnath gaped at him. So did the wizard, in a different, more intensely concentrated way. " Who are you?" he demanded, and then, a moment later, "What are you?"

  By way of reply, Ferdulf stuck out his tongue. It went out improbably far. The tip wiggled like a serpent's tongue for a moment. Then he drew the whole thing back in with a wet plop. He smiled unpleasantly at the Elabonian sorcerer.

  Sweetly still, Gerin said, "Lord Efilnath, lord wizard-"

  "Call me Caffer," the wizard said. As the Fox knew, it was not his real name. Wizards warded those, to keep enemies from working magic with them.

  "Lord Efilnath, lord Caffer, then," Gerin resumed, "allow me to present you to Ferdulf, the son of Mavrix, who, when he is not accompanying me, dwells in the village by Fox Keep."

  "A son of the lord of the sweet grape, here?" Efilnath exclaimed. "Impossible!"

  "Not impossible," Caffer said. "It is truth." He and the Elabonian envoy conferred again, more urgently this time.

  Gerin hoped the idea that Ferdulf was at least in some measure under his control would get through to the imperials. Ferdulf didn't help, remarking, "And a bloody boring hole that village is, too."

  "Yield to the Empire's might, pay the tribute long owed us, and all shall be forgiven concerning these usurpations of authority you have perpetrated," Efilnath said with what he obviously thought was true generosity. "Return to your own barony, abandon any false claims to suzerainty over your neighbors, and live under the beneficent splendor of Crebbig, justly styled the Magnificent."

  "Pay twenty years' tribute?" Gerin shook his head. "Not likely, not when the Elabonian Empire wasn't here for a day of that time."

  "Twenty years' tribute, yes," Efilnath said, "plus whatever you may have owed prior to that time. Our records indicate that you northern barons were shockingly lax in paying your dues even before such time as we temporarily fell out of touch with you."

  "That's a nice way to put it," Gerin said. "Before you forgot all about us, you mean. Before you left us to the tender mercy of the Trokmoi, you mean. Before you weren't here to help us fight the monsters or the Gradi, you mean. And if you go away again now, you'll expect us to pay you again for being gone, won't you?"

  Ignoring the sarcasm, Efilnath said, "You did not, as I have noted, contribute your fair share before we temporarily fell out of touch with you."

  With a shrug, Gerin answered, "It all depends on how you look at things. I never saw any imperial soldiers on the Niffet helping me hold the Trokmoi at bay. If the crops failed, I never saw any grain hauled up from south of the High Kirs to help us. I don't know about you, Efilnath, or about your Emperor Crebbig, either, but I'm not in the habit of paying for what I don't see."

  "Crebbig is your Emperor as well as mine." Efilnath sounded shocked-artfully shocked-that Gerin could imagine otherwise.

  Caffer broke in: "Speak to me of the Gradi, lord baron. South of the High Kirs, we know less of them than we would like."

  "The Fox's style is lord king, even as is mine," Aragis said. " Best you remember it, lest he take your rudeness to heart and avenge himself on you."

  Aragis was likelier than Gerin to do something like that. Gerin started to say he wasn't offended, but then checked himself. Why not give the imperials something else to worry about? He laughed scornfully instead. "I'll answer," he said. "They think they can rule this province, and they don't even know who lives in it."

  "They temporarily fell out of touch, that's all," Dagref said. He struck the perfect tone. It wasn't even scorn. It said the Empire's envoy and wizard didn't rate scorn, only amused disdain.

  It struck home, too. In a voice less suave than he had used before, Efilnath demanded, "Lord baron, will you then yield to the authority of the Emperor Crebbig and beg his forgiveness for the autonomy you have usurped?"

  "In a word, no," Gerin answered. "This would look to be a word you people don't know well, since your comrade heard it from Aragis without listening to it."

  Ferdulf's yawn was as extravagant and as anatomically unlikely as the distance to which he'd stuck out his tongue. "Go away, you foolish people," he said. "You only prove how dull Elabonians can be." And then, without warning, all the gentleness disappeared from his mockery. "Begone. Get out of this land. You have no right to it. I, a god's son, so declare."

  Efilnath flinched. Gerin would have flinched, too, had an angry demigod growled at him. But the Empire's envoy was not without spirit. "The gods of Elabon say otherwise, and I serve them and the Emperor."

  "What do you suppose the gods of Elabon do say, Father?" Dagref whispered to Gerin. "Efilnath and his friends here are Elabonian, but so are we. How do the gods choose one side or the other?"

  "My guess is, they probably don't," the Fox whispered back. The gods of Elabon, from everything he'd seen, intervened in human affairs as little as they possibly could. Most of the time, that suited him fine. Against the Gradi, whose own gods were as aggressive as they were, he'd wished the Elabonian deities had done more. Now, he'd be just as well pleased to have them keep on doing nothing in particular.

  While he and Dagref talked, Efilnath and Caffer were also holding their own low-voiced colloquy. Gerin couldn't make out what the Elabonian envoy was saying. Whatever it was, Caffer agreed with it: he nodded several times, each more vigorously than the one before.

  "Quit jabbering, the two of you," Ferdulf growled at the men from south of the High Kirs. "I told you once, get out of here. Now I tell you twice. Leave while you can still take your clothes with you, which is better luck than the last imperial envoy had, isn't it?"

  Now Efilnath nodded to Caffer. The wizard pointed in Ferdulf's direction. His lips moved. So did his right hand, in passes Gerin knew he would never be able to match for swift fluidity. As Aragis had said, this was a mage from the Sorcerers' Collegium, the most highly trained and skilled band of sorcerers this part of the world knew.

  Ferdulf shouted in rage. "Try and silence me, will you?" he roared, and suddenly, despite staying the same size, seemed much larger and fiercer than he had a moment before. He pointed two fingers at Caffer, a vulgar gesture straight from the alleys of the City of Elabon.

  It was a vulgar gesture with power behind it. Caffer staggered, and had to snatch at the rail of Efilnath's chariot to keep from falling. He looked astonished that his sorcery had failed. The one flaw Gerin had sometimes noted in trained Elabonian wizards was a belief that, because they could do so many things, they could do everything.

  But Ferdulf looked astonished, too. He, evidently, had expected to flatten the Elabonian wizard.

  "Enough, both of you!" Gerin said sharply. "We met here behind a shield of truce. Shall we fall to blows now, and save the waiting?"

  "No," Efilnath said. Caffer gave a shaky nod to show he agreed with his superior. Ferdulf, on the other hand, looked ready-looked eager-to continue the battle of powers. Gerin glared at him. He glared back. His eyes blazed with more power than the Fox had ever seen in them. Resolutely, Gerin kept staring. To his everlasting relief, Ferdulf finally nodded, too.

  "Go back to your soldiers, then," Gerin told the imperial envoy. " When we meet again, we shall be at war."

  "I said this earlier, to your other ambassador," Aragis added. " Now my fellow king confirms it. If you want this land, you will have to take it from us-and from the god's son here." He beamed at Ferdulf. Gerin had never seen him beam before. It was, when you got down to it, a pretty alarming sight.

  "We have powers of our own," Caffer said. His voice wasn't as certain and bright as a new-stamped coin, though. After that first clash with Ferdulf, doubts had entered his mind. Doubt was the enemy of strong sorcery. The thought made Gerin beam, too, in Ca
ffer's direction. The mage from the City of Elabon looked as if he could have done without that sunny smile.

  Efilnath the Earnest tapped his driver on the shoulder. The fellow steered the horses in as tight a circle as he could. They went off the Elabon Way for part of it, their hooves kicking up clumps of dirt and grass. Then they got back on the road and clattered off down the paving stones. In precise order of precedence, the rest of the chariots in Efilnath's party followed, Caffer jumping up into his car when it came past him.

  As that car rolled away, Caffer looked back over his shoulder at Gerin-or perhaps at Ferdulf, who stood nearby. Ferdulf snarled, like one tomcat warning another to go away. Caffer stared steadily back at him-a stare that proclaimed I will not be cowed-until the soldiers in another chariot got between him and Mavrix's son.

  "It will be war." Aragis the Archer spoke with a certain somber satisfaction. "If the imperials will not heed words, let them heed the flight of arrows and the thunder of chariotry."

  "It will be war," Gerin agreed. He looked around. "I don't think Efilnath or his men were paying much attention to our riders. That's to the good, in my view. May they prove an unpleasant surprise for the imperials."

  "So may it be," Aragis said, though sounding more as if he hoped it would be so than as if he expected it.

  "Let's follow the imperials as close as we can," Gerin said. "If they're as proud of themselves as they always used to be, they'll expect us to cower and wait for them to come to us. The more we can rock them back on their heels, the better off we'll be."

  "Oh, aye, no doubt of that. If I'd had only a few more men of my own-or if I hadn't worried that you'd jump me instead of joining me, I'd have done as much myself," Aragis said. He turned his harsh gaze on the Fox. "And now for what you'd likely call an interesting question: who commands?"