Fox and Empire

by Harry Turtledove

  Buzzing like an angry bumblebee, an arrow flew past the Fox's ear. He shook his head, as if at a veritable insect. Indeed: with enough shafts in the air, some were bound to be lucky-and unlucky for him. An old, pale scar puckered his left shoulder. He knew what wounds were like.

  "Here we go," Van said. Aragis wasn't being subtle about what he did: he was throwing his army straight at the imperial forces. Maybe he thought they would break and flee-they were effete southerners, after all. The commander the Elabonian Emperor had sent over the mountains was taking the same approach to the warriors from the northlands. Maybe he thought they would break and flee-they were halfbarbarous rebels, after all.

  Neither side broke. Neither side fled. Neither side did much in the way of maneuvering. Gerin aimed for the driver of the chariot that was thundering toward him. His arrow caught the luckless Elabonian right in the neck. The fellow dropped the reins and clutched at himself as he fell out of the chariot. A wheel thumped over him. He lay very still.

  One of the bowmen in that imperial chariot snatched for the reins. He missed. They dragged along the ground. The horses, no longer under anyone's control, slowed from gallop to walk. Dagref steered past them, so close that Van was able to use his heavy spear. He let out a great shout of fierce glee as he watched the imperial soldier crumple.

  Some of the chariots of the opposing sides shot past one another. Others pulled up to avoid collisions. The fight turned into a melee. What had been neat lines turned into a confused jumble of chariots and horses. Some men kept on shooting arrows at their foes. Others, at closer quarters, drew swords and axes and slashed away at one another.

  "Pull back, in the Emperor's name!" an imperial officer shouted to his men. "We'll form line again and smash through these savages."

  But the troopers of the Elabonian Empire could not pull back and re-form. They were locked together with the warriors from the northlands as tightly as if held in a lover's embrace.

  "Smash 'em!" Aragis yelled. "Smash 'em to pieces!" Gerin wondered how he'd grown so strong with no better notion of strategy than that. Maybe ferocity had had more to do with it than strategy. Any of Aragis' men who gave ground would have to face him afterwards. That meant giving ground was anything but a sure way to escape from danger.

  An imperial chariot pulled close to the one Dagref was driving. One of the warriors in it turned and cut at Gerin with his sword. The Fox leaned away from the blade, which flew past him. He snatched an axe out of a bracket set into the side of his chariot and smashed it into the trooper's ribs. It bit through the scales of his corselet. Blood gushed from the wound. With a bubbling shriek and an outraged expression, the soldier toppled.

  Van boomed laughter. "You do that once every fight, Captain, seems like," he said. "They never expect you to be left-handed, and that's a mistake they never get to make twice."

  Gerin started to answer, but shouted "Watch yourself!" instead. An imperial trooper with an axe ran toward the chariot from the side. Many horses on both sides were down; many drivers had been hit; many chariots had overturned. Some men kept fighting on foot.

  Van jumped down from the car and, with a roar that might have sprung from a longtooth's throat, rushed at the soldier of the Elabonian Empire. The soldier was close to a foot shorter than the enormous outlander, whose helm and the nodding horsehair crest above it made him seem taller still. When Van thrust with his spear, the imperial did not wait to try conclusions with him, but spun on his heel and ran away to find a foe for whom he was more nearly a match. Shouting laughter, Van sprang back into the chariot.

  Dagref managed to get out of the press and send the car, at Gerin' s direction, toward several imperial chariots whose crews were pressing hard against some of Aragis' men and some of his own. A couple of the Empire's chariots also pulled loose and quickly moved to block his path.

  Suddenly, Ferdulf flew down from the sky and screeched in the faces of the imperials' horses. One team ran wild, thundering out of the fight. The other team didn't run at all. The horses reared and screamed in terror. The Elabonian warriors clung to the rails of their car. That was all they could do to keep from being spilled out onto the ground.

  That also made them easy meat for Gerin and Van. The Fox shot one at close range; Van speared another. The third did dive out of the chariot then, and so preserved himself.

  "Well done!" Gerin shouted to Ferdulf. "Keep it up-you'll drive them crazy."

  Floating in midair, Ferdulf grinned at the Fox, who, with the Elabonian Empire as the new standard of comparison, looked better to the obnoxious little demigod than he ever had before. "I've found something else new to do to them, too," Ferdulf said.

  He drifted up above the fight, tugged his tunic up over his belly, and… It wasn't really something new. It was the disgusting game he'd been playing at Fox Keep when Marlanz Raw-Meat came to visit. Then, it had been nothing but disgusting. Now, if a soldier of the Elabonian Empire unexpectedly got pissed on from out of the sky, he was liable to be distracted for a few crucial moments, during which he could neither attack nor defend himself very well. Several soldiers paid with their lives for such distraction.

  Ferdulf seemed to have an unlimited supply of his nasty weapon. Gerin had never thought that one of a demigod's attributes might be the ability to piss endlessly without having to load up on water or ale. That was not the sort of ability on which the Sithonian mythologizers and their Elabonian imitators dwelt. They had their minds on higher things. Ferdulf didn't.

  Another attribute of his, one the mythologizers might actually have mentioned in writing, was his uncanny ability to avoid arrows. He got plenty of chances to use that ability, too. Plenty of outraged imperials sent shafts his way, and he was not floating so high as to be anything but an easy target. Nevertheless, every arrow missed. Gerin couldn't tell whether the arrows went wide or Ferdulf dodged. However that worked, none struck home. He took unpleasant revenge on the men who shot at him, too.

  And then, with a squawk of surprise and indignation, he tumbled out of the sky not far from the Fox. "Oh, a pestilence!" Gerin exclaimed. "Caffer or one of their other cursed wizards found a spell that would bite on him after all. Dagref!"

  "Aye, Father," Dagref said, and then looked back over his shoulder at Gerin. "Are you really sure you want to rescue him?"

  "Don't tempt me, lad," Gerin said. He would have liked it better had the words come out of his mouth sounding more like a joke. But, while he wouldn't have cared to explain himself to either Ferdulf or Mavrix, the idea of leaving the Sithonian god's irksome little bastard to his fate held an appalling appeal.

  Even though Ferdulf wasn't flying, arrows still wouldn't strike him. They dug into the ground all around his little feet, but none pierced his flesh. "Finish him!" an imperial shouted-sure enough, there was Caffer, looking indecently pleased with himself.

  "Steer toward the sorcerer!" Gerin shouted, and shot an arrow at Caffer. The wizard deflected it with an absent-minded pass. He could not do so without effort, though, as Ferdulf could, and, while he was momentarily distracted, the demigod floated off the ground. As soon as the arrow had gone by, the mage from the City of Elabon renewed his spell, and Ferdulf, shouting in fury, found his feet on the ground again.

  Gerin shot at Caffer once more. Once more, the wizard made him miss. An imperial warrior jumped out of a chariot and ran toward Ferdulf, who, after another leap into the air while Caffer was otherwise engaged, had again returned to earth. Cursing, Van sprang down and dashed to the demigod's aid. Unlike the other trooper, this one stood and fought.

  The Fox had scant time to watch that fight. Dagref, by then, had driven quite close to Caffer's car, close enough for him to snap his whip at the wizard. The whip wasn't so easy to deflect as Gerin's arrows had been. Caffer did manage to evade it, then howled a spell. The lash changed to a serpent in Dagref's hands. The serpent hissed, twisted, and tried to bite.

  That, however, did not work so well as Caffer had hoped. Like a lot of boys his age, Dagre
f was fond of snakes. This one was bigger than any Gerin had seen around Fox Keep, but that did not seem to faze his son. Dagref grabbed it behind the head. He had to use both hands to control its writhing length. Gerin snatched up the reins to keep the horses from running wild.

  "Thank you, Father," Dagref said. Then he shouted to Caffer: "You made it-now see how you like it!" He threw the snake into the wizard's car.

  Caffer had had a spell handy for turning whip to snake. He did not seem to have one for turning a snake back into a whip. He and his driver and the warrior in the chariot with them all shouted and stomped and slashed at the serpent, which, like every other serpent, proved extremely reluctant to expire.

  Dagref took the reins back from Gerin as calmly as if nothing had happened. The Fox shot a third arrow at Caffer. The wizard knew nothing of this one till it rammed its way between two ribs and pierced him almost to its fletching. He straightened up and screamed, a long wail of agony and surprise mixed. Since men, like snakes, could prove reluctant to die, Gerin shot him again, this time in the face. He spilled out of the chariot like a sack of peas.

  With a shout of joy, Ferdulf floated above the field once more. Gerin looked around to see if Van needed help against his foe. The imperial warrior lay on the ground, thrashing toward death. Van's spear dripped blood. "Fool was brave," the outlander said as he got back into the chariot, "but that doesn't make him any less a fool."

  "Father, I'm sorry, but I haven't got a whip any more," Dagref said.

  "Considering what you did with it, I think I'll forgive you," the Fox answered, his voice dry. "That was quick thinking."

  Dagref's shoulders went up and down in a shrug. "I didn't see anything better I could do with the thing."

  Van looked around the field, then nudged Gerin. "Fox, are we winning this confounded fight or losing it?"

  Gerin looked, too. "To the five hells with me if I know," he said. "They aren't running, and we aren't running, and we're all mashed together." With a certain sardonic pride, he added, "The fights I make are neater than this, anyhow. Aragis has no sense of tidiness."

  "You can tell him that when everything here is done," Van said with a grin. "Wait till I'm around, though, if you'd be so kind. I want to hear what he says to you afterwards."

  Dagref managed to keep the chariot moving as he wanted even without a whip to speed the horses along. What to do on the battlefield did not come naturally to him, as it did, say, to Van, and to Duren, too. But he thought well, and did not let himself get rattled. All that counted, too.

  And he managed to keep everything that was and should be going on straight in his mind, which a good many men who reckoned themselves great captains had trouble doing. He said, "Shouldn't Rihwin and his horsemen ride in from the flank sometime soon?"

  "Father Dyaus!" Gerin exclaimed. His head whipped around toward the west. "I'd forgotten all about them. Where are they, anyhow?"

  Van looked west, too. "Probably in amongst the trees," he said, " trying to figure out which side is which. Like you said, Fox, this is about as untidy a brawl as I've ever seen."

  "Well, one way for them to neaten things up would be to attack right about now," Gerin said. "Our men know who they are, and the imperials don't, except to figure out that they aren't friends, and-"

  He shut up. Neither Dagref nor Van was paying attention to him. They were both staring west. Gerin took another look in that direction, too. His sour expression disappeared, to be replaced by an enormous grin. Sounding more serious than he often did, Van said, "You ever by any chance think of going into the prophet business?"

  "I leave that to my wife and farseeing Biton, thanks," Gerin answered.

  Regardless of whether or not he'd foretold their arrival, Rihwin's riders approached the battlefield at something close to a gallop. Gerin's men, and Aragis', cheered. The imperials either cursed or laughed.

  More slowly than he should have, the officer who led the Elabonian Empire's army figured out that the horsemen, however peculiar they looked to him, might represent a real threat. He detached a squadron of chariots from his main force-no easy task, considering how heavily engaged against the men of the northlands his army was-and sent them against the new foes on horseback.

  When other imperials weren't trying to kill him, Gerin watched with great interest the clash of the old way and the new. To his vast astonishment, it went exactly as Rihwin the Fox had predicted it would. He'd known Rihwin more than twenty years; in all that time, he couldn't recall thinking such a thing before. What he thought now was that Rihwin had picked a splendid time to be right.

  The chariots thundered across the fields toward the horsemen, bumping and jouncing as they always did. The warriors in the bumping, jouncing cars shot arrows at Rihwin's men. Rihwin's men shot back. Not only that, they rode around the chariots as if the latter were nailed to the ground. They shot back at the imperials from all directions at once; anyone who tried to lift a shield against a shaft coming from the right was apt as not to be pierced by one coming from the left or the rear.

  Dagref said, "We're watching the end of a whole way of fighting. I didn't think it would happen quite so easily."

  "Neither did I," Gerin said.

  "Neither did anybody," Van said.

  But happen it did. Before long, the chariots the imperial commander had sent out against the horsemen were swept off the field as if by a broom. Rihwin's riders began showering the men in the main imperial force with arrows. Some rode close, to use sword and spear against their foes.

  Where the men of the Elabonian Empire had fought Gerin and Aragis' chariots to a standstill, the shock of the new alarmed them far more than its actual effect on the battlefield and the number of horsemen would have warranted. At first by ones and twos and then in larger numbers, they broke off the fight and withdrew to the south. They weren't routed; they fought back fiercely when the men of the northlands pursued. But they weren't going to fight on that field any more, either.

  Rihwin rode up to Gerin. His sword had blood on it. So did his face; an arrow had nicked one cheek. But his face also bore an enormous grin. Gerin didn't blame him-he'd earned the right to grin. " How about that, lord king?" Rihwin said. "How about that?"

  "Well, how about it?" Gerin asked, deadpan. Rihwin stared, then started to laugh. So did Gerin. Why not? They'd won.

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  Contents

  V

  "It's a battle," Gerin said for the eighteenth-or was it the twenty-third?-time that afternoon. "It's not the war."

  This particular time, he happened to be talking with Adiatunnus. The Trokm? chieftain gave him an impatient look, as if he were quibbling over trifles. "They're licked the now, and we'll see them no more, is it not so?"

  "No, curse it, it's not so," the Fox said wearily. "Or rather, it' s so that we beat them, but there's no way of knowing whether that means they've had enough or whether we'll be in another battle day after tomorrow."

  Adiatunnus said, "You're after telling me, then, that the Elabonians from over the mountains are even more stubborn nor the lot of you kerns we Trokmoi have been coping with all along?"

  "As stubborn as we are, anyhow: we're a branch off that trunk," Gerin said. "The other part of the bargain is, they're drawing on the resources of a land bigger than this province, and all of it under the rule of one man; it's not split into fragments the way the northlands are. If the Emperor orders this army to keep fighting, it will. If he orders another army up over the High Kirs, we'll have to fight that one, too."

  "Maybe this whole business of civilization isna the fun I thought it was." Adiatunnus walked off shaking his head.

  Gerin went back to what he had been doing: helping to care for the injured. Study and more practice than he wished he'd got had left him as good a battlefield surgeon as anyone else in the northlands. He dug out arrowheads, stitched up slashes, helped set a couple of broken bones, and urged anyone with any sort of wound to wash it out with ale. "It helps clean," he said, "and a clea
n wound is less likely to go bad than a dirty one."

  "Wine would be better," said an imperial trooper who had been pitched out of his chariot and captured while he was stunned.

  "So it would, if we had any," the Fox agreed. Spotting Ferdulf strolling along not far away, he waved and called the demigod's name.

  Rather to his surprise, Ferdulf came to him. "What do you want?" Mavrix's son asked, sounding less hostile than Gerin was used to. Maybe Ferdulf had figured out that he ought to be grateful. And maybe the Fox would flap his arms and fly to Fomor. He'd borrowed the image from the Trokm? tongue; Fomor was the name the woodsrunners gave the moon Elabonians called Tiwaz.

  Hoping to take advantage of what passed for good nature with Ferdulf, Gerin said, "Do you have any healing powers, by any chance?" Mavrix had great power over flesh, but Gerin thought it wiser not to mention that, lest Ferdulf grow angry at being reminded, however indirectly, that he was only half a god.

  The question seemed to take Ferdulf by surprise. "I don't know," he answered. "I don't think I ever tried. Why should I try, anyhow? Even if I can, all I'd be doing would be healing Elabonians, and I don't like Elabonians."

  "You'd be healing warriors who could fight against the Elabonian Empire again," Gerin pointed out.

  "There is that," Ferdulf admitted grudgingly. His small shoulder shrugged. "Oh, all right, I'll see what I can do. I don't know if I can do anything, you know. Sometimes, when I try to do something, I find I can. Sometimes I can't. That makes me angry."

  "Be angry at the Empire, for causing these wounds in the first place," Gerin suggested. "Don't be angry at our men who are hurt. It's not their fault."

  "No?" Ferdulf said. "If they were better soldiers, maybe they wouldn't have got hurt to begin with." But, having said that, he went over to a man who was cursing as blood from a wounded arm slowly soaked the bandage wrapped around the injury.

  "What's he going to do?" The soldier looked at Ferdulf as dubiously as the demigod was looking at him.

  Ferdulf reached out and touched the bandage. The warrior exclaimed in delight. Ferdulf exclaimed, too, and jerked his hand away. He grabbed at his own arm, in the spot where the warrior had been wounded. His lower lip stuck out in petulant dismay. "It hurts! It hurts as if the arrow had gone into me."