Fox and Empire

by Harry Turtledove

  "Ah," Gerin said, and nodded. "Now I understand. You're not happy about the notion of traveling through the haunted woods, eh?"

  "To put with as much abridgment as I can muster, lord king, no," Rihwin said. "Are you?"

  "Not so you'd notice," Gerin answered. "But if it's a choice between that and staying here so the imperials can finish wrecking us, I know which direction I'll go. All I can do is hope my men and I come out on the other side. If we do, maybe we can smash in the head of the imperials' column as they come after us."

  "That would be good," Rihwin said without much conviction. He didn't think it would happen, then.

  "Better still," Gerin said in a spirit of experimentation, "would be meeting the imperials here in the valley of Ikos and driving them back."

  Plainly, Gerin didn't think that would happen, either. "Yes, that would be better, lord king," he agreed. "Not likely, perhaps, but better without a doubt. How do you aim to produce a victory when lately we've known nothing but defeat?"

  "I don't know," Gerin admitted, which seemed to nonplus Rihwin more than anything else he might have said. "The best we can hope for now, it seems to me, is to hope the imperials haven't the stomach for a long, hard campaign and give up and go home."

  "We might have had a better hope for that had we gained the aid of the lord of the sweet grape," Rihwin said.

  "That's not what Biton said, but then you've never been much interested in any opinion but your own."

  Rihwin scowled at him; a moment later, though, the eyes of the man from south of the High Kirs widened. "You demon from the hottest hell," he whispered. "You let me go through the danger of summoning Mavrix hoping and expecting I would fail, and you said never a word."

  "I understand how surprising it must be for you to discover there are people who can on occasion keep their mouths shut," Gerin replied sweetly. "You really should try it sometime. It can be useful."

  "To the crows with utility, and to the crows with you, too," Rihwin said. His effort to stalk off in impressive fury was hampered when he bumped into Van. Like everyone else who bumped into the outsized outlander, he bounced off. He kept stalking after that, but it wasn't the same.

  Van shook his head. "I see you were rattling his cage again."

  "Twice," Gerin answered. Then he corrected himself. "No, I take that back. He rattled his own cage once, when he figured out I wasn't too unhappy that he hadn't managed to get Mavrix to help us after all."

  "What did he do, say you were trying to use him as a sacrifice, the way the god of the Weshapar wanted Zalmunna to sacrifice his son?"

  "He didn't use that example, no, but that was the general tone, as a matter of fact." The Fox laughed. Laughing felt good. It also let him take his mind off the unpleasant fact that he still had no idea how to stop the imperials. But when he stopped laughing, that fact remained-and it seemed to be laughing at him, laughing and showing fangs as long as sharp as those of a longtooth.

  Maybe it was laughing at Van, too. He said, "Come morning, that Swerilas the Slimy is going to start nipping at our tails again."

  "Slippery," Gerin said. "Swerilas the Slippery, no matter how slimy he is. But…" He hesitated, then spoke in some surprise: "I may just know what I'm going to do about him. Aye, by the gods-and by one god in particular-I may just."

  **

  Sure enough, Swerilas pushed his men forward not long after the sun came up. The temple guards did resist them. So did a rear guard of Gerin's men. But the imperials were too many to be withstood for long, and in Swerilas had a leader who grew angry with anything less than victory.

  Gerin fed more men into the fight, not so much in expectation of stopping Swerilas as to slow him down. And, had Swerilas not already been a suspicious sort, failure to try to hold him off would have made him one. Slowing him down also let Gerin's main force forage among the prosperous villages of the valley of Ikos as they retreated toward the Sibyl's shrine.

  The temple guards peeled off to defend the temple from its marble outwalls. Gerin ordered his own men to keep on retreating. Dagref gave his father a curious look. Then, all at once, it vanished from his face. "Biton's temple holds a lot of rich things, doesn't it?" he remarked.

  "Oh, there might be a few in there, I suppose," Gerin answered, his voice elaborately casual. "Why? Do you think that might be interesting to the imperial soldiers and their officers?"

  "It just might," his son said, imitating his tone with alarming precision. "The one thing about which the men of the northlands always complain is how the Elabonian Empire squeezed wealth out of them like a man squeezing whey out of a lump of cheese."

  "Biton isn't the sort of god who fancies being squeezed," Van put in.

  "You know that," Gerin said. "I know that. The question is, does Swerilas the Slippery know that? And the other question is, if he does know, does he care? He has wizards with him. He has the backing of the Elabonian gods, or thinks he does. Maybe he won't care a fig's worth, and think he can take whatever he pleases."

  "Wouldn't that be nice?" Van said dreamily. "We've seen the plague Biton sends down on people who try robbing his shrine. All those blisters and things-it's not pretty, not even a little bit. Fox, don't you think this Swerilas would look mighty fine all blistered up?"

  "Since I've never met him, I don't know how ugly he is already," Gerin replied. "But any old imperial covered in blisters would look pretty good to me right now."

  North of the Sibyl's shine lay the town that catered to visitors to the valley who came seeking oracular responses. The town was not what it had been in Gerin's younger days. Traffic for the Sibyl had diminished when the Elabonian Empire severed itself from the northlands, and diminished again after the earthquake that loosed the monsters on the earth. Many of the inns and taverns and hostels that had served travelers were empty. Some were wrecks that had gone unrepaired since the quake fifteen years before. Grass grew where others had once stood.

  The innkeepers whose establishments survived viewed the arrival of Gerin's army with the same delight that serfs would have shown over the arrival of a swarm of locusts, and for similar reasons: they feared the troopers were going to eat them out of house and home, and they were right.

  "Is this justice, lord king?" one of them wailed as Gerin's soldiers gobbled bread and roasted meat and guzzled ale.

  "Probably not," the Fox admitted. "But we're hungry and we're here and we're bloody well going to eat. If we win this war, I'll pay you back next year-by all the gods I swear it. If we lose, you can send the bill to Crebbig I, the Elabonian Emperor."

  "Then I'll root for you," the innkeeper said. "You have a good name for not telling too many lies. I wouldn't wipe my arse with a promise from somebody on the far side of the mountains, not that I even have a promise from the whoreson to wipe my arse with."

  Gerin thought it likely the innkeeper would see the imperials at first hand before too long. As he'd hoped, Swerilas had slowed his aggressive pursuit of the men from the northlands when he came in sight of Biton's shrine. Rihwin's riders had no trouble holding the imperials away from the town of Ikos, not for the time being.

  Taking advantage of that, the Fox put as many of his men in real beds as he could. The summer's fighting had worn down his troopers; the more rest they got now, the better they would perform when they had to climb into their chariots again.

  He slept outside rolled in a blanket himself, which perplexed Adiatunnus. "Where's the point to kinging it if you canna be after enjoying yourself?" the Trokm? chieftain demanded. He hadn't been slow about claiming the pleasures of a bed.

  Gerin shrugged. "I'm all right. Some of the men with small wounds need mattresses worse than I do."

  "Maybe that's so, and maybe it's not," Adiatunnus said. "Most o' these lads are half your age-half my age, too, forbye-and think naught of a night in the open. If you say you don't creak of a morning, you' re a better man than I am-or else you're a liar."

  "I do creak," Gerin admitted, "but I don't creak too badly.
And half the time I'll creak when I get up out of a bed in the morning, too. I'm at the age when creaking is part of being alive. I'm used to it. I don't love it, but I can't do anything about it."

  "Nor I," Adiatunnus said sadly. "Nor I. But I creak less if I'm rising from soft straw or wool, sure and I do, and so I'll take a bed when I find one. A bed is better when you're after finding a friendly barmaid, too."

  "However you like," Gerin said with another shrug. Like Van, Adiatunnus wenched whenever he found a chance.

  He laughed at the Fox now. "You canna be saying you're so old, it stirs in your breeches no more. When it does, why not let it out to play? Plenty o' girls'd lie down with you just for the sake of saying they'd bedded a king."

  "I don't want-" Gerin stopped. What he'd been about to say wasn't true. He wasn't immune from wanting an attractive woman when he was away from Selatre. What he did, or rather didn't, do about it was something else again. He changed the direction in which the sentence had been going: "I don't want to complicate my life. How many bastards have you got?"

  "A good many, I'll allow," the Trokm? answered, laughing again. " Not so many as Rihwin, I expect, but I had fun getting every one of ' em."

  "All right," Gerin said. "I don't begrudge you the way you live your life. Why can't you let me lead mine as suits me best?"

  Adiatunnus scowled again. "How can I be having a proper quarrel with you when you willna get angry?"

  "My quarrel is with Swerilas the Slippery, not with you," Gerin replied. "You're my ally and my vassal; he's my foe." He grinned a lopsided grin. "And when we were young, neither of us would have believe that could be so, not for a minute we wouldn't."

  "Truth that," Adiatunnus said. "Och, how we hated the very name of yourself on the far side of the Niffet! Too good you were, too good by half, at tying us all in knots whenever we thought to raid over the river. And then, we we did at last lodge ourself on this side, who but you did so much against us and kept so many from crossing? And now you are my overlord, and we have the same enemies, as you say. Aye, 'tis strange and more than strange."

  "If I can put up with the likes of you," Gerin said, "I shouldn'tand I don't-mind putting up with a blanket on the ground."

  "Sure it was for your kindness and sweet spirit I first named you king," Adiatunnus said. He walked off shaking his head and laughing.

  The next morning, Maeva, her face glowing with self-importance, came riding back from the line against the imperials with the fat eunuch who had taken Gerin down to the Sibyl's cave. "He says he must have speech with you, lord king."

  "I'm glad enough to speak with him," Gerin answered, and turned to the priest. "How now?"

  Awkwardly, the eunuch prostrated himself before Gerin, as if before an image of farseeing Biton. "Lord king, you must save the god' s shrine from desecration!" he cried.

  "Get up," the Fox said impatiently. When the priest had risen, Gerin went on, "Who says I must?"

  "If you do not save the shrine, lord king, the arrogant wretches from south of the High Kirs will plunder it of the accumulated riches of centuries." The priest seemed on the point of bursting into tears.

  For his part, though, Gerin had hoped the accumulated riches in and around Biton's temper would make Swerilas forget about him for a while. And so he repeated, "Who says I must save the shrine? Is it a command sent straight from Biton himself?" If it was, he might have to obey it, however little he wanted to.

  But the priest shook his head, the loose, flabby flesh of his jowls swinging back and forth. "Biton has been mute in this matter," he said in his sexless voice. "But you, lord king, are well known for the great respect you have always shown the farseeing god."

  "If the farseeing god ordered me to try to drive the men of the Elabonian Empire from his temple, I would do it, or do my best to do it," Gerin answered, on the whole truthfully. "Since he does not, though, let me ask a question of my own: why do you think I retreated past the Sibyl's shrine and made my base here in the town of Ikos?"

  "I wondered, lord king," the eunuch priest replied. "I thought surely you would defend us with all your power."

  "With all my power." Gerin heard the bitterness in his own voice. "If I had the power to stop the imperials, why would I have retreated into the valley of Ikos in the first place? Why would I have retreated through it? Why will I have to retreat out of it if the imperials attack me again?"

  The priest stared at him. "But you are the chiefest warrior in all the northlands. How could you be beaten?"

  "More easily than I'd like, as a matter of fact," Gerin answered. "When the Elabonian Empire sends more men against me than I can withstand, they beat me. Nothing complicated about it at all. And you can be glad Aragis the Archer isn't here to hear you call me the chiefest warrior, too. He'd disagree with you, and he isn't pleasant when he disagrees."

  He might as well not have spoken. The priest didn't interrupt him, but plainly didn't pay any attention to his words, either. The fellow went on, "And you are the favorite of the farseeing god as well. How could it be otherwise, when you are wed to Biton's former Sibyl?" He sighed, perhaps admiring the close relationship with Biton he thought being married to Selatre gave Gerin, perhaps-as he was a eunuchadmiring Gerin for being married at all.

  And, where he had not before, he gave Gerin pause. Did being married to Selatre give him any special obligations? It had given him advantages in the past, and accounts had a way of balancing. Even so, he hardened his heart and shook his head, saying, "If the farseeing god wants anything from me, he can tell me himself. I'll do what I can then. Without orders from the god, though, I'm not going to throw myself and my army away. Have you got that?"

  The eunuch stared at him out of large, dark, tragic eyes. "I have indeed, lord king," he said. "I shall take your words back to my comrades in Biton's holy priesthood, that they may learn nothing shall suffice to rescue them from the rapacious clutches of the Elabonian Empire."

  Gerin's children sometimes tried to make him feel guilty by taking that tone of voice. It didn't work for them, and it didn't work for the eunuch priest, either, though the Fox didn't laugh at him as he often did at his offspring. "If Biton wants his temple to stay unplundered, I expect he can manage that without me."

  "I console myself with the hope that you are right," the priest replied, "but I have seen little to persuade me of it." He turned and waddled south, back toward the temple.

  "Thanks, Maeva," Gerin said, watching him go. "You did the right thing to bring him to me, even if we can't help him now."

  "I wish we could," Maeva said.

  "So do I," Gerin said, "but if we could beat Swerilas' army any time we chose, don't you think we would have done it by now? Go on back and keep an eye on the imperials. They did slow down for the temple, the way I hoped they would. Sooner or later, they'll start again."

  "Aye, lord king." She sketched a salute and rode after the eunuch priest.

  The imperials did not move that day. Gerin hoped for thunderbolts from the temple, but none came. Glad at least for the respite, he wrapped himself in his blanket and went to sleep. While he slept, he dreamt.

  It might have been the strangest dream he'd ever had. He kept seeing everything in it from an enormous distance, so he could make out nothing clearly. At the same time, he felt an overpoweringly strong sense of urgency. It was almost as if he were seeing the very edge of an important dream truly intended for someone else.

  He kept trying to get closer to the center of the dream, to learn why it seemed so important. Try as he would, though, he could not. His dream-self ground its teeth in frustration. He might have stood at the bottom of some deep, smooth-sided hole too deep from him to climb out of it. But he had to climb out of it, no matter what.

  When he woke, he was on his knees, his hands up over his head. He stared around in confusion at the inns and houses of Ikos, and at the campfires around which most of his soldiers slept. For a moment, they seemed far less real than the dream he'd just lost.

&nb
sp; He bit his lip. He'd missed something important. He knew he'd missed something important. He hated missing anything important. In the straits he was in, he couldn't afford to miss anything important. He couldn't do anything about it, though.

  Maybe if he lay down and fell back to sleep, the dream would return. They sometimes did. Maybe, too, he would find himself closer to the heart of the matter. He bit his lip. He didn't like maybes. But, with no better choice, he lay down. Eventually, he slept. So far as he remembered, he dreamt nothing more for the rest of the night.

  **

  In the morning, Dagref and Ferdulf were missing. Gerin didn't fret so much over the demigod. For one thing, he thought Ferdulf likely able to take care of himself. For another, the camp was a good deal quieter without Ferdulf around.

  But Dagref-for Dagref to run off struck Gerin as highly unlikely. And then, all at once, it didn't. Dagref could have had a perfectly good reason for slipping out of camp, a reason named Maeva. That he should have been so foolish as not to come back before things started stirring was another matter, one over which Gerin intended to have some pointed conversation with him.

  The Fox couldn't even lose his temper, not so thoroughly as he would have liked, unless he wanted to alert Van to the reason he was upset. The outlander, seeing he was worried but not fully grasping why, said, "To the five hells with me if I like the notion of Dagref and Ferdulf going off together. Who can guess what mischief they're liable to get into till they go and do it?"

  And that gave Gerin something new to worry about. He'd been thinking so much about Dagref and Maeva together, the prospect of Dagref and Ferdulf together had entirely escaped his mind. That was an oversight on his part, he realized. "You don't suppose they've gone off to conquer the imperials all by their lonesome, do you?"