Fox and Empire

by Harry Turtledove

  "Nothing," Gerin replied, which made both Dagref and Van stare at him. He went on, "I won't send her up to Duren without finding out whether he wants to have anything to do with her. I offered to bring her along with the army so she'd find out as soon as I did whether he wants her to come up to his holding, but she said no to that."

  Van coughed. "If she hangs around here, she won't know for a goodish while what Duren has to say, because the imperials aren't going to stop following us. They'll be here day after tomorrow at the latest."

  "I don't think that was the biggest worry in her mind," Gerin answered. "She has relatives south of the High Kirs. You've met one of them-remember?"

  "Aye, now that you remind me of it. Some sort of fancy noble, gave the Emperor advice." Van frowned in concentration. "Valdabrun-that's what his name was. He had a mistress I wouldn't have minded tasting at all."

  "That's the name," Gerin agreed. "Now me, I'd forgotten about his leman till you called her to my mind."

  "You were too busy staring at Elise to have much room left in your mind for other women," the outlander said. Gerin would have got angry at him had he not been telling the truth.

  Dagref said, "If her family were advisors to the old Emperor, what does this new Emperor think of them?"

  "I don't know," Gerin answered. "That also crossed my mind. I don' t think it crossed Elise's, and by then I wasn't going to bring it up. If she goes south of the High Kirs, she's gone, that's all. I won't miss her, not a bit." And that was true, or almost true. He'd missed her more than he'd imagined possible, back in the days just after she first left him. Occasional echoes of that feeling had kept cropping up through the years, even after he'd been happily yoked to Selatre for a long time.

  Was one of those echoes cropping up now? If it was, he didn't intend to admit it, even to himself. He waited for Van or Dagref to challenge him. Van, after all, had known Elise, while Dagref had few compunctions about asking questions, no matter how personal.

  But neither of them said anything. He realized neither of them was going to say anything. A small sigh of relief escaped him. They'd let him off the hook.

  **

  Ferdulf flying above them, Gerin's men rolled north through the village the next morning. The Fox wondered if Elise would come out and watch them go, as some of the villagers did. He didn't see her. Once he'd passed through, he decided that was just as well.

  Now, instead of screening the army's advance, Rihwin's riders covered the retreat. They did a better job of that than Gerin had thought when he gave them the duty. Rihwin came trotting up to him to report: "The imperials keep dogging us, aye, lord king, but not very hard. We've taught them respect, I think, for they are never sure if we might gallop out at them from some unexpected direction."

  "That's good," Gerin said. "If we'd taught them so much respect that they stopped dogging us altogether, that would be even better."

  "It would also be too much to ask for," Rihwin pointed out.

  "Oh, I wasn't asking for it," Gerin said. "If I did, no one would pay me any attention. But it would be better."

  "Er-yes," Rihwin said, and soon found an excuse to rejoin his riders.

  Van chuckled. "That was well done, Captain. Not easy to confuse Rihwin-not least, I expect, on account of he's so often confused on his own-but you managed." The outlander lost his smile. "Have to tell you, though, I'm a bit on the confused side myself. What are we doing now, and why are we doing that instead of something else?"

  "What are we doing?" the Fox repeated. "We're falling back-that's what. Why are we doing it? I can think of three reasons offhand." He ticked them off on his fingers: "If we don't fall back the imperials will smash us here. That's one. If we do fall back, maybe the imperials will string themselves out or give us some chance to hit part of them from ambush. That's two. And, as we're falling back, we' re falling back into country that hasn't been foraged too heavily, so we won't starve, which we would, and pretty bloody quick, if we stay where we are. Three."

  "Aye, well, there is that." Van looked around. "Falling back toward land Aragis rules, if we're not on that land already. Don't know how happy he'll be if we take everything that isn't tied down and cut the lashings off what is tied down so we can take that, too."

  Gerin looked around. "To the five hells with me if I know where Aragis' southern border is. Maybe we'll find boundary stones, maybe we won't. To the five hells with me if I care, either. If Aragis thinks I'm going to starve to death to keep from bothering his serfs' precious crops, to the five hells with him, too."

  Over his shoulder, Dagref said, "If the threat lay by the Niffet, he'd eat you out of house and home without a second thought."

  "Well, the gods know that's true," Gerin said. Now he looked straight ahead, north and a little east, a thoughtful expression on his face. "Ikos is just on the other side of Aragis' holdings, too. I' ve never had cause to go to the Sibyl by the southern route, but maybe I will." He nodded, more decisively than he'd thought he would. "Yes, indeed. Maybe I will."

  Dagref said, "In the learned genealogies, they say Biton is a son of Dyaus Allfather, but-"

  Gerin held up his hand. "But that's Elabonians writing for Elabonians below the High Kirs," he finished. "Biton is truly a god of this land here, and everyone who lives in the northlands knows it."

  "Even so," Dagref said. "Compared to the gods of the Gradi, Baivers, god of brewing and barley, is a god of this land, even though we Elabonians brought him here a couple of hundred years ago when we conquered this province. Because he is a god of this land, you were able to use him against the gods of the Gradi. From that, it would follow logically-"

  "-that I might use Biton against the Elabonian Empire." Gerin interrupted once more. "Yes."

  "I thought you might not have seen it," Dagref said, a little sulkily.

  "Well, I did." Gerin clapped his son on the back. "Don't let it worry you. The two of us think a lot alike-"

  "You're both sneaky," Van put in.

  "Thank you," Gerin and Dagref said in the same breath, which made the outlander stare from one of them to the other. Gerin continued, " As I was saying before we were disturbed by a breath of wind there-"

  "Honh!" Van said.

  "-the two of us think a lot alike, but I've been doing it longer, so it's likely I'll come up with a lot of the same notions you do," Gerin went on imperturbably. "That shouldn't disappoint you, and it shouldn't stop you from telling me what's on your beady little mind-"

  "Honh!" Now Dagref interrupted, doing a surprisingly good impression of Van.

  Gerin talked through him as he'd talked through the outlander: "because you never can tell, you might come up with something I've missed." He took a deep breath, triumphant at finally managing to complete his thought.

  "Fair enough, Father." Dagref heaved his shoulders up and down in a sigh. "Hard sometimes, being a smaller, less detailed copy of the man you've already become. It makes me feel rather like an abridged manuscript."

  "No, not an abridged one," Gerin said. "You just have a lot more blank parchment left at the end of your scroll than I do, that's all."

  "Hmm." Dagref contemplated that. "Well, all right-maybe so." He flicked the reins and urged the horses up to a better pace.

  "By the things you've said, Fox, I know what the difference between you and him is," Van remarked.

  "Tell me," Gerin urged. Dagref's back expressed mute interest.

  "I will," Van said. "The difference is, Fox, that your father had no more idea what to do with you than a crow would with a chick that came out of the egg with white feathers instead of black. Is that so, or am I lying?"

  "It's so, sure enough," Gerin agreed. "My brother was a warrior born, everything my father could have wanted. My father hadn't the slightest notion what to make of me. I might be the first real live scholar spawned in the northlands in better than a hundred years."

  "And yet you're a king, while your father died a baron, so you never can tell," Van said. "But my point is, D
agref's the second real live scholar spawned in the northlands. You have a notion of what you' ve got there, while your father had never a clue with you."

  "Ah," Gerin said. "Well, there's some truth in that, sure enough. How about it, Dagref? Do you like it better that I can guess along with you some of the time, or would you rather I had never a clue?"

  Dagref looked back over his shoulder at the Fox again. "I can guess along with you some of the time, Father. What in the world makes you think you can guess along with me?" Van guffawed. Gerin felt his ears heat.

  **

  Riders and charioteers fanned out through the countryside around the village by which Gerin had chosen to camp for the night. They brought back cattle and sheep and ducks and chickens. "Had to let the air out of a shepherd before he'd cough up his beasts," one rider said, patting his bow so as to leave no possible doubt about what he meant.

  Under other circumstances, Gerin would have been angry at him for alienating the peasantry. As things were, the Fox hardly noticed the comment. He had his sword in his left hand, and was wondering if he'd have to start carving chunks off the village headman, who was doing his best to act like an idiot from birth.

  "No," the fellow said, "we don't have no grain stored in pits. We don't have no beans in pits, neither."

  "That's very interesting," Gerin said, "very interesting indeed. I suppose you get through every winter by not eating during most of it."

  "Seems that way, a lot of the time," the headman answered sullenly.

  "Well, all right." Gerin's voice was light and blithe. "I suppose we'll just have to burn this place down so all these houses here don't get in our way while we're searching."

  The headman sent him a look full of loathing and led him over to the storage pits, which had been concealed by grass growing over them. "I thought you had a name for being soft alongside Aragis," the peasant grumbled.

  "Only goes to show you can't always trust what you hear, doesn't it?" the Fox returned with a smile. The village headman's glare held even more hate than it had before. Having got what he wanted, Gerin generously affected not to notice. Keeping his army fed was at the moment more important than keeping Aragis' peasants happy.

  That was his opinion, at any rate. He discovered the next day that Aragis had a different one. A chariot bearing the Archer's son, Aranast, came jouncing over a side road toward Gerin's army. When Aranast had made his way up alongside the Fox, he spoke without preamble: "Lord king, my father forbids you from foraging on the countryside while in lands whose overlord he is."

  "Does he?" Gerin answered. "That's nice."

  Aranast took off his bronze, potlike helm and scratched his head. "Does that mean you will obey this prohibition?"

  "Of course not," Gerin replied. "If he can teach me how to subsist on no food while I cross his lands, I might try it. Otherwise, though, I'll do what I have to do to get through them."

  "You dare go against my father's stated will?" Aranast's eyes went round and wide and staring. No one in Aragis' lands had dared go against his stated will for many years. Though Aranast gave signs of being a fairly formidable fellow in his own right, he seemed astonished anyone might imagine going against his father's stated will.

  "I just said so. Weren't you listening?" Gerin asked politely. " He's not my suzerain, so I'm under no obligation to obey him, and he's told me to do something impossible, which means I'd be an idiot to obey him. Do I look like an idiot to you, young fellow?"

  Aranast didn't answer that, which might have been just as well. His frown did its best to be severe to the point of threatening. People were no doubt much more in the habit of calling him things like prince and heir and maybe your highness than young fellow. Taking a deep breath, he said, "My father entered into alliance with you in good faith. He did not enter into it to give you leave to plunder his holdings."

  "Oh, don't be a pompous twit," Gerin said, which flicked Aranast on his vanity much harder than young fellow had done. The Fox went on, "I told you once, I don't aim to let myself starve. If I were plundering, though, I'd have booty with me, wouldn't I? I'm feeding myself and I'm feeding my men. Would you like some roast mutton?"

  "Generous of you to offer me what already belongs to my father," Aranast remarked. Dagref was much younger, but would have done the sarcasm better than Aranast even so. Still, the effort was there.

  Gerin rewarded it with sarcasm of his own: "Glad you think so." That drew another glare from Aragis' son. "Where is your father, anyhow?" the Fox asked.

  "West of here," Aranast answered. "The imperials still press him hard. Some of them are between him and you. I had to thread my way past them to deliver his word to you, and to have you set it aside as being of no account."

  "It was a foolish word to deliver, and you can tell him I said so. He might be better off if more people let him know when he was being foolish," Gerin said. "But he sees no hope of linking with me again?"

  "He does not, being too sore beset," Aranast answered. "He hoped you might rejoin him, and also expressed the hope that you would use your skill at magic to good effect in the struggle against the Empire."

  "I'll do everything I can," Gerin said with a sigh. Aragis persisted in believing he could do things he couldn't. He held up a forefinger. "Has Aragis also forbidden the imperials from plundering his holdings?"

  Aranast shook his head. "No, for he did not think it would do any good. You, however, are not his enemy, unless you choose to make yourself so."

  "Or unless he makes me one by insisting I do things I can't," Gerin said. "A man who asks too much of his friends starts finding out he doesn't have so many friends as he thought he did."

  "I will take your words back to my father, that he may judge them for himself," Aranast said stiffly.

  "Fine," the Fox told him. "Tell him this, too: if he wants to fight a war against me after we beat the Empire, I'll be ready, the same as I was ready to fight a war against him before I knew the imperials were on this side of the High Kirs."

  He kept astonishing Aranast. "You challenge my father?" Aragis' son said. "No one challenges my father."

  "I've done it for more than twenty years, as he's challenged me all that time," Gerin answered. "Tell him I'm doing what I have to do here, no more-and no less."

  Still scowling, still muttering to himself, Aranast Aragis' son got back into his chariot and rattled off toward the west, toward whatever was left of Aragis' army. "Well, he doesn't lack for nerve, that's certain," Van said, eyeing the dust the horses' hooves and the chariot's wheels kicked up from the track along which it traveled.

  "Who doesn't?" Gerin asked. "Aragis or Aranast?"

  "Both of 'em, now that I think on it," the outlander replied. Gerin watched that receding plume of dust, too. After a moment, he nodded.

  **

  Getting livestock and grain from the peasants who lived under Aragis' rule turned out to be, for the most part, easier than Gerin had expected. The majority of village headmen had lived so long under the Archer, they seemed to have forgotten the possibility of cheating an overlord. "Take what you will, lord," one of them told Gerin. " Whatever you take, you'd do worse to us if we tried to hide it from you." The men and women who came up to listen to him talking with the Fox nodded. Aragis, evidently, had given lessons of that sort.

  A few villages, though, appeared to have no substance whatsoever: only huts and whatever was ripening in the fields. Gerin's men found no livestock even on searching the nearby woods, and the headmen at such places staunchly denied having grain pits anywhere by their huts.

  "Do what you want with me," one said. "I can't give you what I haven't got."

  "You should be careful saying things like that," Gerin told him. " If you said them to Aragis or his men, they'd do it."

  The headman pulled off his tunic and stood there in his wool trousers. He turned his back on the Fox. Long, pale ridged scars crisscrossed it. "Laid the whip on himself, he did," he said with something that sounded almost like pride. "He d
idn't come away with anything here, either, on account of there isn't anything to come away with."

  After seeing those scars, Gerin gave up and went on to the next village, whose headman proved more tractable. The Fox remained unconvinced the serfs he'd just left had as little as they'd shown, but lacked both time and inclination to check as hard as he might have otherwise. He also knew a certain amount of admiration for their headman. Anyone who could stand up to Aragis had more than the common amount of nerve.

  Every so often, the imperials hounding the Fox's force would press forward. A couple of the skirmishes were sharp, but the men from south of the High Kirs made no effort to get close to his army, stay close to it, and hound it to death, which was what he would have done to theirs had it not been reinforced. He wondered how Aragis fared, with more imperials after him. The Archer had sent no more messengers to him after Aranast's unsuccessful mission.

  Keeps dotted the landscape, as they did throughout the northlands. Most of the nobles who dwelt in them had gone to fight under Aragis. These days, the castles housed striplings, graybeards, and noblewomen who were often more determined than the menfolk left behind. Some of the keeps opened their gates to share what they had and let Gerin and some of his officers sleep in real beds. Some-very often, those where petty barons' wives seemed to be in charge-stayed shut up tight against his force, as if against enemies.

  "If you're friends, you won't be offended that we don't let you in, because you'll understand why we don't," one of those women called from the walkway around the wall of the keep she was running. "And if you're foes masquerading as friends-well, to the five hells with you, in that case."

  Gerin didn't push her any further. For one thing, he would have had to lay siege to the keep to get inside if she wouldn't let down the drawbridge. For another, what she said made perfectly good sense from her point of view.

  Van thought so, too, saying, "By the gods, if Fand were running a keep, that's the sort of defiance she would shout."