He sighed. He couldn’t do anything about that. He wasn’t Van’s nursemaid. If the outlander didn’t get so drunk as to make himself too hung over to stay in the chariot come tomorrow, the Fox had no call to upbraid him.
“But it’s—untidy, that’s what it is,” he said to no one in particular. Finding exactly the right phrase satisfied him in a way even shouting at Van couldn’t have done. He wrapped himself in a blanket and went to sleep.
Outriding the news of its coming, the Elabonian army descended on Adiatunnus’ keep and the village—almost the town—close by it. “If I’d done as well as this when I was the Trokmê’s enemy, he’d have feared me more,” Gerin said.
As he’d been doing all along, he looked up into the sky. The weather remained hot and dry. He and his men were close to the Venien now. If Stribog interfered with the normal run of things, they would know it sooner and more surely than back at Fox Keep. He saw no sign of any such thing, and was relieved.
Adiatunnus rode out from his castle to greet Gerin and the men with him. “The fellow you sent ahead, he said you’re after thinking of fighting the Gradi on their own ground again,” he said, sounding anything but delighted at the prospect.
“It’s not their ground,” the Fox answered. “Some of it, in point of fact, is mine. I intend to take it back, and to drive them off it.”
“You intended the same earlier in the year, and had nobbut bad cess,” Adiatunnus said. “Why d’you think your luck’ll be better on a second go?”
“I’ll tell you why,” Gerin said, and did. He finished, “I don’t know whether Baivers and the monsters’ gods have beaten Voldar and the Gradi crew, but I’d say they haven’t lost. If they had, the weather would be worse.”
Adiatunnus tugged at one side of his drooping mustaches. “It could be so,” he said at last, after some thought. “Not long ago, the cold storms came rolling over the Venien one after t’other, you might say, and the Gradi looked to be gathering for a push right at us.” He scowled. “Shamed as I am to own it, we’d have broken and run without your Widin. On our own, we canna stand against the Gradi. But he said he’d fight ’em with us or without us, and so I called up all the men, to give him what help we could.”
Making himself stand against a foe who had trounced his folk time after time had taken courage, and courage of an unusual sort. “Widin’s not the only man here with spirit,” the Fox said, acknowledging that. “What happened then? I haven’t heard of the Gradi crossing the Venien.”
“They didna,” Adiatunnus said. “Not so many days ago, the storms stopped and it was summer again, as fine a summer as any I’ve seen. And the Gradi drew back a ways from the Venien. We slipped a few o’ Widin’s men and mine over the river to see if they could find out what was toward, and they tell me the reivers seem all in an uproar, like as if summat they’d expected hadna happened after all.”
“Maybe, just maybe, I kept it from happening,” Gerin replied. “And if I did, the best thing we can do now is hit them as hard a blow as we can, give them something else they aren’t expecting.”
“Can we do it?” Adiatunnus asked.
“Of course we can,” Gerin said heartily, though he did not think the Trokmê chieftain had in fact aimed the question at him. Adiatunnus sounded more as if he were putting it to his own gods, the gods whom Voldar and the Gradi had beaten and terrified. What sort of answer would he find, whether from them or in his own heart?
After a long pause, Adiatunnus said, “Well, we’d best have a go. If we dinna go to them, they’ll come to us, sure as sure, and no good will spring from that.”
The endorsement, while anything but ringing, was an endorsement. “We’ll move against them tomorrow, your men and mine together,” Gerin said. Adiatunnus stared at him. Now the Fox glared, playing to the hilt the role of outraged feudal overlord. “Tomorrow I said and tomorrow I meant. And I mean in the morning, too, even if I have to boot every one of you lazy, sleepy woodsrunners in the arse to make it happen.”
“Lazy!” Adiatunnus clapped a hand to his forehead. “Sleepy? We’ll show you, you black-hearted spalpeen!”
“I hope you do,” Gerin said. “But if you don’t”—he waved back at his army—“I’ve brought enough Elabonians along to get you moving.”
“Elabonians? Foosh!” Adiatunnus said. “We make no special shivers for Elabonians. It’s not as if you were so many Gradi, now.”
“To the crows with you,” Gerin exclaimed. Both men laughed. They’d tried to kill each other before; they might well try to kill each other again one day. Meanwhile, though, they saw they had more urgent things to worry about than their old animosity. That in itself eased Gerin’s mind. He had been far from sure Adiatunnus would be able to look to what might lie ahead rather than remembering the past. For that matter, he’d been far from sure he’d be able to do that himself.
“If you’re right, Fox, and we beat the Gradi …” The Trokmê chieftain’s voice trailed away, as if he had trouble believing such a thing possible. After a moment, he started up again: “If we do that, “twill be a braw thing you’ve managed: aye, a braw thing indeed.”
“We’ll see what happens, that’s all,” the Fox said. “I’ve always tried to take the fight to the other fellow when I stood any chance of doing it.”
“That I ken,” Adiatunnus said, “for you’ve done it to me more times nor I care to recall. May we have the same luck against the Gradi.”
“Sounds like a toast to me,” Van said, “and only a fool would make a toast without washing it down.” It was not a subtle hint, but Van was not a subtle man: in that he matched the Trokmoi more closely than the Elabonians among whom he lived. As Adiatunnus had taken on more Elabonian ways than most of the woodsrunners south of the Niffet, he might have found Van’s approach imperfectly polished. If he did, he was too polished himself to show it. Smiling, he waved Gerin, Van, and the rest of the Elabonian warriors toward his keep.
Gerin looked back at the Venien River. It wasn’t a great stream like the Niffet into which it flowed; it seemed hardly enough to serve as the boundary between not just two peoples but almost between two worlds. But back there on the eastern side, Gerin had been prince of the north, overlord of all he surveyed. If he claimed to rule here, he would have to make that claim good against the Gradi.
As he had even in his own holding, he kept a weather eye on the sky. Storm clouds building in the west might give warning the Gradi gods had won their war. He saw none; the day remained fine. What he did see was Adiatunnus, also nervously eyeing the western horizon.
Catching his glance, the Trokmê looked briefly shamefaced. “It’s only that I’m after remembering the last time we tried coming this way,” he said. “Another summer blizzard like that—” He broke off, plainly not wanting to think of it. Gerin didn’t want to, either, but couldn’t help himself.
A car holding Widin Simrin’s son rolled up alongside Gerin’s. Widin pointed ahead. “Gradi up that way, lord prince, based at what was a peasant village.” He spoke with authority; the scouts, Elabonian and Trokmê both, who had been slipping off over the Venien to spy out the raiders’ doings reported to him when they returned—if they returned.
The Fox waved half the chariots off to the left and the other half to the right, wanting to hit the Gradi from two directions at once. He led the left-hand column himself. At his father’s order, Duren urged the horses up into a gallop. “Speed and surprise will get us more here than stealth,” Gerin judged.
Surprised the Gradi certainly were. When they spied the chariots rushing toward them they let out loud bellows of alarm. Some of them dashed back into the peasant huts they’d appropriated and then came back out with axes and a few bows. And a handful did something Gerin had never before seen Gradi do: they turned tail and ran for their lives.
Even as he nocked his first arrow, the Fox pointed to them and called, “I want some of those men taken alive. We may be able to learn a lot from them.” A handful of chariots peeled off after t
he fleeing Gradi.
The fight with the ones who hadn’t fled was as fierce as usual, but did not last long: between them, the Elabonians and Trokmoi had their foes badly outnumbered, and the arrival of the second column moments after the first threw the Gradi into confusion, for a good many of them could not decide which group of opponents to resist.
When they saw they had no hope of winning the fight, the Gradi began slaying one another to keep from being taken prisoner. Rather more of them than usual, though, did let themselves be captured. That piqued Gerins curiosity in the same way as the earlier spectacle of running Gradi had done.
After helping see to his own men, he went to question the warriors who’d fled or been captured. They sat glumly on the ground, hands bound behind them with leather thongs. “Who speaks Elabonian?” Gerin demanded.
Several Gradi stirred. “I speak it, somely,” one of them said, proving his own point.
Gerin wasted no time with ancillary questions. “Why did some of you run? Why did some of you give up?”
The Gradi looked at one another, then down at the ground. The Fox knew shame when he saw it. The prisoner who had spoken before answered, “It is not what the chiefs tell us. It is not what the gods tell us.” A couple of others who understood Elabonian exclaimed, trying to silence him, but he went on, “It is so. We were to strike, not to be striked. The gods do not do what they say they do. They trickfool us. Why we do for them?”
“How did your gods fool you?” Gerin did his best to make the question sound casual. He had to work not to lean forward and throw it out like a man casting a baited line into a pond.
And that Gradi seized the bait. “They say they help us,” he answered. “They say you not can backfight. They say they chase your pisspot gods, eat them, throw dead of them on dunghill. They trickfool us.”
His gray eyes were full of angry indignation. For a little while, Gerin had trouble understanding that. Then he realized he was used to living in a part of the world where the gods seldom played an active role. That was not true of Voldar and the rest of the Gradi pantheon. Now the raiders were having to do things for themselves, without their gods to help them. If this first taste of how they performed under such circumstances meant anything, they were going to have some trouble adjusting.
Gerin hoped they had a lot of trouble adjusting. Turning to Adiatunnus, he said, “You see? We’re fighting just them now, not their goddess.” Here across the Venien, he didn’t feel like naming her, even if she was otherwise occupied.
Adiatunnus noticed that. He said, “You started well before, Fox, and then it all went sour. Finish well, now, and you’ll show yourself right.”
“Fair enough.” The Fox spoke to the warriors guarding the Gradi prisoners: “Send them back over the Venien. The work we get out of them as slaves will pay back a little of what they’ve done to us.”
He watched the prisoners closely as he spoke. Some of them admitted to understanding Elabonian. He saw no tries for escape, no tries for suicide, among those men or any others. The likeliest explanation was that they were cast into confusion because their gods were less with them than those gods usually were.
He very much wanted the likeliest explanation to be true. Because he so much wanted it to be true, he distrusted it all the more.
“Only one way to find out,” he said. Adiatunnus gave him a curious look. He pretended not to see it.
Whether or not the Gradi had been readying themselves to cross the Venien a few days before, they were not ready to defend against a strike from the eastern side of the river. Each group of them, gathered in villages or encamped in the woods, fought Gerin’s army with an effort individually often heroic but invariably futile: those groups were crushed, one after another.
“Why don’t they come together, Father?” Duren asked as the army made camp after one such little battle. “They’d be tougher meat if they did.”
“I’m still not sure,” Gerin answered, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. He’d earned that sweat fighting the Gradi, but it had come easy: the day was a muggy scorcher. “But I’m beginning to think they’re so used to talking with their gods, and to listening to them, that they have trouble figuring out what to do when they’re on their own.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Van said. “My guess is, that won’t be long. Sooner or later, they’ll come out of their fog and remember they’re men, not gods’ toys life gets harder after that.”
“I’m the one who’s supposed to come up with cheery thoughts like that,” Gerin said. “Your job is to say, ‘No, no, Fox, everything will be fine. We’ll whip these Gradi right out of their furs.’” He deepened his voice and gave it a slight guttural rasp, doing his best to imitate the outlander.
His friend grunted laughter. “Nobody can always see what he’s going to do himself, let alone what the fool standing next to him is liable to come up with. When you threw Baivers and the underground powers at the Gradi gods, you surprised even them, I think.”
“As long as they keep on being surprised.—Gerin looked at the sky so often these days, he hardly noticed himself doing it. So long as the clouds stayed away, so long as the hot weather held, he would assume the monsters’ gods and Baivers still kept Voldar and the other Gradi gods too busy to make trouble down on the merely mortal plane of being.
He knew how rough a gauge that was. Voldar and her crew might overcome the invaders before Stribog recovered from the supernatural wounds he’d received in his fight. If that happened, the first the Fox would know of it was running headlong into the angry Gradi gods. He did not look forward to that sort of confrontation.
Best way to keep it from happening, he told himself, is to beat the Gradi so badly, their gods won’t have much of a place to roost in the northlands. He’d known all along what needed doing. Knowing how to do it was another matter, worse luck.
An Elabonian spy brought him news the next day that the Gradi had regarrisoned the tumbledown keep in which he’d defeated them in his earlier foray into the country they held. “They don’t have much in the way of imagination, do they?” the Fox said.
When he sent scouts out to approach the place, he discovered how little imagination the Gradi were showing: their sentries seemed no more alert to attack than on his previous incursion. It was as if the idea that their enemies could bring the war to them rather than the other way round had never occurred to them. Gerin aimed both to exploit their naïeveté and, having exploited it, to fill the gap in their education.
“Shall we dismount again and trick them?” Duren asked.
“They’d never fall for the same trick twice,” Van protested. Gerin got the feeling the protest sprang more from his inability to look like a Gradi than from any consideration of grand strategy: the outlander felt cheated out of a good fight. No wonder he’d been able to fathom the minds of the monsters’ gods—his own worked the same way. Could he have been projected up into the plane of the gods, he would have had a splendid time battling Voldar and her companions.
In the end, the Fox decided to try the same plan again, taking advantage of the confusion the Gradi seemed to feel without their gods leading them by the noses. These were, after all, not the same men in the keep as the ones his force had overwhelmed before. He led the band of foot soldiers who approached the keep. Many of them were wearing captured Gradi helmets and carrying captured Gradi axes in place of their own weapons, doing their best to make the ruse convincing.
When the band of men on foot approached, the drawbridge to the keep was up. He cursed on seeing that. A Gradi up on the wall shouted something at him and his men. A couple of the Trokmoi spoke a little of the Gradi tongue. One of them shouted back, presumably saying something like, It’s all right—let us in.
And the drawbridge came down. “We are lucky,” Duren breathed.
“We certainly are,” Gerin said. “We’re lucky enough to run in there and see how many of us are going to get killed. Aren’t you glad to have luck like that?” Dure
n nodded eagerly Gerin cursed—that wasn’t the answer his son would give when he had a little more sense.
But then, if he’d been sensible himself, he wouldn’t have attacked this keep in the first place. He yanked his sword out of the scabbard and ran for the drawbridge. His men followed, their shouts making the morning hideous. The drawbridge started to rise, but it could come down faster than it went up.
Gerin got over the bridge and into the courtyard. He ran into the gatehouse with half a dozen men at his heels. They quickly slew the pair of Gradi who had been working the big capstan around which the drawbridge chain was wound. With another shout, the Fox let the capstan spin in the opposite direction. The drawbridge thumped all the way down again, and this time stayed down.
In swarmed the warriors who had approached on foot. Gerin knew the rest of his army would soon join them: a runner would report initial success to the chariotry hanging back just out of sight. Meanwhile, how many Gradi were in the keep and how ferociously would they fight?
A good many of them fought as ferociously as they ever had. One snarling knot of men near the entrance to the great hall of the castle did not come undone till the last Gradi fighting there had fallen. But fewer Gradi manned the keep than had been here before, and not all of them chose to fight to the death. When Elabonians and Trokmoi began leaping out of chariots and running to join the fight, a startling number of the raiders still on their feet threw down their axes and gave up.
“Where is great Voldar? Where is Lavtrig? Where is Smerts?” one of the prisoners said in fair Elabonian. “How can we beat you thralls without our gods? It is not fair.”
Gerin found the Gradi’s notion of fairness curious, but did not try to persuade him it needed changing. Instead, he allowed himself the luxury of a sigh of relief that the Gradi gods were still preoccupied, and the even greater luxury of hope that they would keep on being preoccupied.
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