Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

Gerin ran-slowly, favoring his right leg-to his son's aid. Dagref proved not to need any aid. With him, as with the Fox, looks turned out to deceive. Though he had no sword or spear, he'd held on to the whip he used to urge on his team (a replacement for the one Caffer had turned into a snake). He waited till the Elabonian chariot was terrifyingly close, then lashed out with the whip, striking one of the horses on its soft, tender nose.

The animal screamed in shock and pain. It stopped dead and tried to rear. The driver kept it from doing that, but the chariot thundered past Dagref instead of riding him down. And, as it went past, the whip lashed out again. The driver screamed as loud as the horse had. He clutched at his eyes. The other two imperials in the car clutched at the reins he'd dropped.

Neither one of them could make a clean grab. That was unfortunate for them, because they got only the one chance. Dagref cracked the whip again. One of them shrieked. He shrieked again a moment later when Van speared him in the side-shrieked and crumpled. Gerin scrambled up into the chariot. The surviving unwounded imperial was an archer who carried only a dagger for self-defense. He didn't stay unwounded long. He scrambled over the rail of the car and ran off howling and dripping blood.

Killing the driver seemed unfair, since he still had both hands clapped to his face. In the middle of a battle, though, fair was a flexible notion. Gerin thrust home hard, threw the driver's thrashing body over the side, and seized the reins. He started to shout for Van and Dagref, but they were already up in the car with him.

With a flourish, he handed his son the reins. "I think you know what to do with these," he said.

"He knows what to do with all sorts of things," Van said, an enormous grin on his face. "Don't you, Dagref the Whip?"

"Who, me?" Dagref looked absurdly pleased with himself. A man could get an ekename any number of ways. If he was very fair or very fat, he might have one before he could toddle. Or he might be called his father's son his whole life long. Earning an ekename on the battlefield didn't happen to everyone. It didn't happen to many, in fact.

"Dagref the Whip," Gerin agreed. "Better than Dagref the Surly, or Dagref the Brown Study, or-"

"Since the whip is still in my hand," Dagref remarked pointedly, "a prudent man would save such suggestions for another time."

"A prudent man wouldn't have done a lot of the things I've done over the years," Gerin said.

"You're the most prudent man I know, Fox," Van said.

"That may be true, but it doesn't say much for the rest of the people you know," Gerin retorted. Fand immediately came to mind, but the Fox was prudent enough not to mention her. Instead, he said, "How prudent is it, for that matter, to ride around in a chariot when none of us has a bow?"

"You should have grabbed the one that imperial had before you pitched him out of the car," Van said.

"Aye, that would have been prudent," Gerin agreed, "if only I'd thought of it at the time. Can't think of everything at once, though, no matter how much I wish I could."

Van said, "Well, since we haven't got one, we'll have to pretend we're some of Rihwin's riders, and see how close we can get to the imperials. I've always liked that kind of fighting better, anyhow."

"Why am I not surprised?" Gerin murmured. Being so big and so strong, the outlander naturally excelled at close-quarters fighting. A man with a bow, though, might hurt him before he had the chance to do damage of his own.

Dagref took the discussion between his father and his father's friend as an instruction for him, and guided the chariot toward the nearest one full of imperials. The men of the Elabonian Empire, seeing a car that looked like their own, took a fatal moment too long to realize the warriors inside were foes. Van speared one of them, Dagref kept using the whip to wicked effect, and, by the time the brief fight was done, Gerin once more had a bow to call his own.

He reached over his shoulder to snatch an arrow out of his quiver. An imperial screamed like a longtooth a moment later, and clutched at the side of his thigh. The Fox shot another arrow. This one missed. He reached back yet again-and found the quiver empty.

He scowled. The quiver had been nearly full before he spilled out of the chariot. Before he… He growled a curse. Most of the arrows must have gone flying from the quiver when he hit the ground. He hadn't even noticed. He'd had rather more urgent things on his mind, such as staying in one piece.

"Come on, Fox," Van said. "Why aren't you shooting at the whoresons?"

"I'll tell you what," Gerin answered. "As soon as you figure out how to spear them without any spear, I'll shoot them without any arrows."

"What?" The outlander stared. Then his face cleared. "Oh. Aye. We did go arse over soup-pot there, didn't we? Well, all right, we'll have to keep on doing the way we did just now, won't we?"

"Sooner or later, everyone will start running out of arrows," Dagref said.

"Oh, indeed." Gerin nodded. "The next interesting question is whether people will run out of arrows before one gets stuck in one of us. That's an interesting question in any fight."

"Interesting. Oh, aye. Heh." Van snorted, then spat. In a way, that was disgust. In another way, it was bravado. Not many warriors on the field, Gerin would have guessed, had enough saliva in their mouths to spit. He was a long way from sure he did himself. He worked his cheeks experimentally.

Then he stopped worrying about whether he could spit. There ahead, sure as sure, was a gap in the imperials' line, where chariots had swung right and left around one that had overturned, and then hadn't closed up again. He looked around. Not far from him-how they'd got there, he hadn't noticed-were a good many chariots full of Trokmoi. He waved to them. A couple of the woodsrunners aimed arrows at him. They lowered them when he shouted in their own language: "Through there, now"-he pointed-"and we'll be after carving a great chunk from the southron spalpeens."

"Do you want me to go through that gap and hope the barbarians will follow?" Dagref asked. By his tone, he'd heard ideas he liked much better.

But Gerin said, "That's just what I want you to do."

"Be a mite embarrassing if the Trokmoi decide they'd sooner be rid of you than of the cursed imperials," Van remarked. What he meant was, If that happens, we're going to get killed . Gerin couldn't recall the last time he'd heard such a protest so elegantly phrased.

He stopped worrying about that, too. "Go on," he told Dagref. "Quick, now, before they close up the hole."

"All right." His son urged the horses forward. The Fox shouted when the chariot did force its way between two manned by soldiers of the Elabonian Empire. The imperials hesitated before trying to block his path: as had happened once already, they thought anyone in a chariot from south of the High Kirs was bound to be a comrade.

As had happened once already, they discovered they were mistaken. Gerin laid open the face of one of the imperial troopers on his left, a cut that took the enemy doubly by surprise because he delivered it with his left hand. On the other side of the car, Van speared an imperial archer out of a chariot. The fellow looked comically surprised, or would have had he not also been in agony.

"Well, I think that's drawn their notice," Dagref said.

"I bloody well knew it would draw their notice," Gerin answered as an arrow hissed past his ear. "What I want to know is, has it drawn the woodsrunners in after us? If it hasn't…" He let that hang. If it hadn't, Van was right-they would get killed.

He looked back over his shoulder… and whooped with glee. The Trokmoi were behind him, and more of them than he'd expected. Often, what looked suicidally stupid to an Elabonian looked like fun to a Trokm-. Gerin was heartily glad of that, not least because it meant the imperials wouldn't be concentrating on him alone. They'd have other things on their minds, such as stopping the penetration before it split their whole army in two. Sometimes distraction was better than victory. Sometimes they were one and the same.