Fox and Empire

by Harry Turtledove

  "You handled that smoothly," Aragis said to Gerin; the Fox supposed he meant it for a compliment. "I wouldn't have decided as you did, but I can see how and why you did it, which I never would have guessed when I spied… your new warrior." With a nod to Maeva that might have been ironic or might not, he took himself off, too.

  Maeva went back toward the rest of the riders. Gerin expected Dagref to follow her, but the youth stayed. "I want to thank you, Father, for keeping Maeva with the army," he said. "If you'd ordered her back to Fox Keep, I would have used the promise I won from you to make you change your mind."

  "Would you?" Gerin said, and his son nodded. Half the Fox-maybe more than half-wished he had ordered Maeva back. That would have rid him of the promise at a price he could afford. Now- Who could say what Dagref would come up with now? Gerin eyed his son in a speculative way. "You must think a lot of her, if you'd give up the promise for that."

  "She's like a sister to me," Dagref said. Then, a moment later, he turned pink. With characteristic honesty, he corrected himself: "Maybe not quite like a sister." He didn't so much leave as flee. Rubbing his chin once more, Gerin stared after him.

  **

  The next morning, Gerin's men and Aragis' moved south after the imperials. The pursuit went slowly. Gerin had expected it would, but it was even slower than he'd looked for. In their withdrawal, the soldiers of the Elabonian Empire had manhandled boulders onto the Elabon Way and scattered caltrops not only on the road but in the fields to either side of it.

  "We may have won a battle, Fox, but we haven't won the war," Aragis the Archer said. "They'll be ready to take us on again before long."

  "I thought as much from the way they pulled back," Gerin answered. "I said so, to whoever would listen. Nobody much listened. I wish I'd been wrong."

  Every so often, he would roll past wreckage of the army he had beaten: a chariot fallen to pieces; a dead horse; a hastily dug grave, brown against the green of the fields, to mark the final resting place of some imperial trooper who'd died slowly instead of quickly. Every time he spotted a grave, he wondered if Maeva had seen it. That probably didn't matter. No one her age believed anything bad could happen to her. The years taught you otherwise, sooner or later-more often sooner.

  A rider came trotting back from around a bend in the road. "Lord king!" he shouted, and then, remembering himself, "Lord kings!"

  "What have the imperials gone and done now?" Gerin asked.

  "Lord king," the scout answered, seeming relieved to be speaking to a single sovereign, "lord king, there's a wall across the road."

  Gerin pictured a barricade of rocks and logs, perhaps with a few dismounted archers behind it to give approaching warriors a greeting less friendly than they might have wanted. "Did you ride around it?" he asked. "Do they have an ambush somewhere back of it?"

  "Couldn't ride around it, lord king," the horseman said. "It's too wide to ride around." He stretched out his arms as far as they would go.

  "What's he talking about?" Aragis demanded irritably.

  "I don't know," the Fox admitted. "Best thing I can think for us to do is go have a look for ourselves." He tapped Dagref on the shoulder. "Forward. We'd better find out."

  As soon as the chariot rounded the bend, he saw the horseman had been telling the truth. His own visualization had been at fault. The wall was of red brick, about ten feet high, and stretched off to east and west as far as the eye could see. Van said, "The imperials couldn' t have built that."

  "Of course not," Gerin agreed, "or their soldiers couldn't have, anyway. It's sorcerous, without a doubt."

  "Maybe it's an illusion," Van said hopefully. "Maybe if we go up to it, we can go right through it."

  It looked very solid. Of course, an illusion that didn't look solid wouldn't have been much of an illusion. Gerin jumped down from the chariot. He walked up to the brick wall and slapped it with the palm of his hand. It felt very solid, too. Suddenly suspicious, he closed his eyes and walked forward. He bumped his nose, not too hard, because he wasn't going too fast.

  He opened his eyes. He was staring at bricks, up so close they were blurry. He backed away. The bricks became sharp and clear. They didn't disappear, no matter how hard he wished they would.

  More and more of the army came round the bend in the road. Gerin heard the exclamations of surprise that rose from his men and Aragis'. Some were just exclamations of surprise. He could deal with those. He was surprised himself. Others, though, ones that came mostly from his men, were full of confidence that he could get rid of the wall in short order.

  Van had his own ideas about how to do that. Saying, "Don't be shy with the cursed thing," he shouted for a hammer. When he got one-a stout bronze-headed tool that looked about as deadly as the mace he carried-he slammed it into the wall with all his strength. Nothing happened, except that he grunted in pain and rubbed at his shoulder. " Didn't even dent it," he said in disgust.

  "You wouldn't," Gerin said. "It's magical."

  "Really?" Van said, packing enough sarcasm into the word to prove he'd lived a good many years in Fox Keep.

  Aragis the Archer said, "This is why I wanted you with me, Fox, not against me."

  Gerin glared at him. "Why? So I can look like an idiot in front of your men and mine both?" Aragis' expression was one of stolid incomprehension. He was convinced Gerin was a marvelous mage. Nothing would unconvince him except watching the Fox fail. In that case, he was liable to get unconvinced in a hurry. Hoping to sidestep the issue, Gerin looked around and shouted, "Ferdulf!"

  "What do you want?" the little demigod demanded. He was back to being surly. Most of the time, Gerin wouldn't have let that bother him. Now he would have been glad for a little of the grudging gratitude Ferdulf had shown right after the battle against the Empire.

  Since he didn't have it, he went ahead without: "Can you fly up over the wall and tell us what's on the other side of it?"

  "Grass," Ferdulf said. "Trees. Cows. Elabonians. Go far enough and there are mountains. I don't need to fly over it to tell you that."

  Gerin exhaled through his nose. I will not let the little divine bastard get my goat, he thought. With as much patience as he could, he said, "Knowing exactly where the imperials are might be good for us. We'll probably fight them again once we get past the wall, you know."

  "Oh, all right," Ferdulf said sulkily, and hopped up into the air. What happened next made everyone who saw it exclaim in surprise and alarm. As Ferdulf rose, so did the wall in front of him.

  He exclaimed, too-angrily. He didn't much care about obeying Gerin. Having the Elabonian Empire thwart him was something else again. But as fast as he flew, as high as he flew, whichever way from side to side he flew, the wall rose to keep him from passing over it. When he flew lower, it shrank, as if it, or the wizard in charge of it, could sense exactly how high he was at any given moment.

  When he returned to the ground, the wall went back to being what it had been before he started flying: ten feet high, and very solidlooking. Gerin rubbed his nose. It felt as solid as it looked.

  "You ought to knock it down," Ferdulf said. "A wall like that has no business existing in the first place."

  "Van didn't have much luck. And if it's magical, I'm not sure we can knock it down," Gerin said. "For instance, how thick is it?"

  "I don't know," Ferdulf answered. "I think you're pretty thick yourself, though, if you stand here and let it baffle you."

  Rihwin the Fox came riding over to Gerin. "Nice piece of work, isn't it?" he said with the tones of one admiring a fellow professional's achievement even when that achievement inconvenienced him. He'd studied sorcery down in the City of Elabon till a jape played on a senior wizard got him expelled from the Sorcerers' Collegium. Despite that expulsion, he'd been a better mage than Gerin up to the moment when Mavrix took away his sorcerous powers. He still knew magic well, even if he couldn't work it any more.

  "I'd like it better if it weren't so nice," Gerin said.

  "Oh, but it
's as pretty a use of the law of similarity as I've ever seen," Rihwin protested, "not only in building the wall, but also in making detection of the keystone-or rather, in this case, the key brick-as difficult as possible."

  "What nonsense is he spouting now?" Aragis demanded irritably.

  Gerin took no notice of his fellow king. "Father Dyaus," he whispered. "I do believe you're right."

  "Of course I'm right," Rihwin said. "When have you ever known me to be mistaken, pray tell?"

  "Only when you open your mouth," Gerin replied, which reduced Rihwin to irate splutters. Gerin ignored those, too. He walked up to the wall and examined it brick by brick. Sure enough, each brick was identical to all its neighbors: not just similar to them, but identical. Each one had a chip near the center, each had a scratch at the upper left-hand corner, and each, over to the right, had embedded in it a tiny crystal or flake of mica that sparkled when the light caught it at the right angle. "Isn't that interesting?" he murmured.

  "Now you're the one full of drivel," Aragis complained. "Tell me at once what's going on."

  "One of their wizards took a brick and sorcerously duplicated it about as many times as there are drops of water in the Niffet," Gerin answered. "If I could find out which brick is the real one, I wouldn't have any trouble-well, not much trouble-making the wall disappear."

  "Ah," Aragis said, and then, "All right. I was beginning to wonder whether you were able to talk sense or not. I see you are. Good. As I told you, I wanted you on my side because of the wizardry you know. Now-find that brick and get rid of it."

  Rihwin had the grace to give Gerin a sympathetic look. "It's not quite so easy as that, I'm afraid," Gerin said. "One of these bricks along the bottom row is sure to be the brick, but which one? Go ahead, lord king-you tell me which one it is."

  "You're the wizard," Aragis said. "You're the one who's supposed to know things like that. Now get to work, curse it." He might have been ordering a lazy serf to spread manure over a field.

  "I can't tell which brick it is by looking, any more than you can," Gerin said. "That means I've got a couple of thousand to choose from. And that's liable to mean we'll be here for a while."

  "Can we go around the bloody thing?" Aragis asked.

  "Maybe," Gerin said, "but I wouldn't bet anything I cared to lose on it. My guess is that, if the wall can go up and down to keep Ferdulf from flying over it, it'll go from side to side to keep us from getting by it."

  "That makes more sense than I wish it did," Aragis said. "How do you go about finding out which brick is the brick, then?"

  "You have not put forward an easy question, lord king," Rihwin the Fox said. "The essence of the law of similarity centering on resemblance, distinguishing between prototype and likeness is by its nature a daunting task."

  "If it were easy, the cursed imperials wouldn't have bothered running up the wall in the first place," Aragis retorted. He folded his arms across his chest and looked over toward Gerin. "Well?"

  "Well, my fellow king, much as I hate to disappoint you-and to disappoint myself, I might add-I haven't the faintest idea which one is the brick," Gerin answered. "I told you that once already. Maybe I can figure out some sort of sorcerous test, though the gods only know how long that'll take or whether it'll work. You'd need a god to tell you which one brick out of thousands is the real one and…" His voice trailed away. "You'd need a god-or maybe a demigod. How about it, Ferdulf?"

  "You want something more from me?" Ferdulf said indignantly. His sigh declared that he was put upon far beyond anything his powers might have made acceptable. "There are times when I wonder why the gods ever bothered creating mortals in the first place."

  "Some Sithonian philosophers wonder whether mortals didn't create gods instead of the other way round," Gerin said, which made Ferdulf, despite being descended from a Sithonian deity, give him a horrible look. He wished he'd kept his mouth shut. Since he hadn't, he went on in smoothly ingratiating tones: "Be that as it may, can you use your own great powers to see what we cannot? It would give you another chance to have a go at the Elabonian Empire, and embarrass the imperial wizard who put up the wall thinking it would stop us so easily."

  "Oh, all right." Even in agreement, Ferdulf was petulant. In that, he took after his father. He floated up a foot or so into the air and drifted along to the west a couple of hundred yards. "It's this one right here." He didn't raise his voice-or Gerin didn't think he didbut it came as clear as if he'd been standing by the Fox. A helpful soldier ran forward and set his hand on the brick after Ferdulf left it.

  Gerin trotted over to it, ignoring the weight of his bronze-andleather armor. To look at, it was just another brick in the wall. He'd expected nothing different. He turned to Van, who'd followed him. " Will you do the honors?"

  "I will, and gladly," the outlander answered. He smashed at the brick with the bronze-headed hammer. When a chip flew from it, chips flew from all the others along the wall. Soldiers cheered. Van hit the brick again and again, till it cracked in three places. The rest of the bricks cracked, too. Van pushed at one of the pieces with his foot. It came away from the rest of the brick-and the wall vanished.

  About a hundred feet behind it stood a fellow in a fancy robe who looked absurdly surprised to be staring all at once at the entire army of the northlands. "That's a wizard!" Gerin exclaimed as the man turned to run. "Don't let him get away."

  "I'll take care of that," Van growled. He snatched up a piece of the brick he had broken and flung it at the sorcerer. It caught him between the shoulderblades. He went down on his face with a dismayed squawk. Before he could get to his feet again, Dagref and a couple of other men who'd run after him jumped on him and frogmarched him back to Gerin and Aragis.

  "Hello," the Fox said mildly. "I gather you're to blame for this latest bit of unpleasantness?" The wizard didn't answer. Gerin clicked his tongue between his teeth in mock dismay. "And I remembered manners south of the High Kirs being so much smoother than they are here in the northlands. Tell us what to call you, anyhow."

  "Lengyel." The sorcerer replied to that without hesitation. It was, after all, only his use-name, not his hidden true name.

  "Well, Lengyel, suppose you start answering my questions," Gerin said, still sounding mild but looking anything but.

  "Well, Lengyel, suppose you start answering questions or we'll see how long you last up on a cross," Aragis added. "You'll have a cursed hard time working magical passes with your hands nailed to the wood." Sounding mild was beyond the Archer, but he did seem more matter-offact than menacing. To Gerin, at least, that made him more frightening, not less.

  It seemed to have the same effect on Lengyel, who did not look to be in a good position to work passes anyhow, not with Dagref jamming one arm up behind his back and the other held tight against his side. After licking his lips, the wizard said, "Tell me what you want to know."

  "You were the fellow who made this wall?" the Fox repeated.

  "Yes," Lengyel said, and then spoke in some exasperation: "And I certainly did not expect a pack of semibarbarous backwoods bumpkins to penetrate its secret quickly. I did not expect you to penetrate them at all, in fact."

  "You keep a civil tongue in your head if you want to keep any tongue in your head," Aragis said, in about the tone Gerin would have used to tell Blestar to get down off the table.

  "Don't worry about it, Archer," Gerin told him. "That's how the Empire thinks of the northlands. It's how the Empire has always thought of the northlands. Since the Empire hasn't had anything to do with us for the past twenty years, you can't expect them to have changed their minds during that time."

  "How did-?" Lengyel's face suddenly twisted in pain. "Stop that!" he hissed.

  "Then you stop wiggling your fingers," replied Dagref, who had given the wizard's arm a yank. "I don't know what sorcery you were trying, and I don't care to find out, either."

  Lengyel bowed his head. For the first time, he seemed to realize the sorcerous wall hadn't come down and he
hadn't been caught by a lucky accident. "You northerners are… more clever than I'd expected," he said slowly.

  "We're clever enough to know we're better off out of the Empire than in it, anyhow," Gerin said. "Of course, you don't have to be very clever to figure out that paying taxes and not getting anything for them-no soldiers when the barbarians come over the border, no grain when the harvest fails-isn't the best bargain in the world."

  "You people have paid no taxes the past twenty years, and you didn't pay many before that," Lengyel returned. "Why you deserve to be rewarded for not doing what you should have is beyond me."

  "Even when we did pay, back a long time ago, the City of Elabon forgot everything this side of the High Kirs," Gerin said.

  "That isn't the point," Aragis said. "The point is, where in the five hells is the imperial army we thrashed? Once we thrash it again, and maybe one more time after that, you southerners will figure out that you ought to leave us alone."

  "This is the territory of the Empire of Elabon," Lengyel said. "We shall not abandon what is ours."

  "I think you'd be wise to answer King Aragis," Gerin said. "If you don't answer, he's liable to get insistent, and you wouldn't care for that. Believe me, Lengyel-you wouldn't."

  Lengyel looked at Aragis. He licked his lips again. Gerin hadn't said what Aragis would do to him if sufficiently displeased. He'd figured Lengyel's imagination would come up with something more horrific than anything he might suggest. If studying Aragis' hard face didn't start a frightened imagination working at a gallop, nothing ever would.

  To make matters worse, Aragis smiled. The Fox would not have wanted to be on the receiving end of that smile. By all appearances, Lengyel didn't, either. His larynx worked a couple of times before he said, "The army-my army-will be most of a day's journey south of here, no doubt regrouping to face you reb-uh, you northerners-once more, and this time come away victorious."

  "No doubt," Gerin said dryly. "Now-will the other wizards with the army know this wall has fallen, or will we be able to give them a surprise greeting?"