Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

"I want my father!" Ferdulf shouted again.

The space around the wineskins seemed to… expand. "My son, I am here," Mavrix said.

"Father!" Ferdulf cried in delight.

Gerin trotted out his halting Sithonian: "I greet you, lord of the sweet grape." He bowed low, looking at the Sithonian god of wine and fertility from under his eyelids.

Mavrix, as usual, wore supple fawnskin. A wreath of grape leaves kept his long, dark hair off his forehead. Ferdulf's eyes had flashed; Mavrix glowed all over, raiment and all. The only darkness in him was his eyes, twin pits of deepest shadow in his effeminately handsome face.

"Well," he said now, voice echoing inside Gerin's head as if the Fox heard him with mind rather than with ears, "I have not been north of the mountains in some little while. I cannot say this benighted excuse for a country has improved much since I last saw it, I must tell you."

"What do you mean?" Now Ferdulf sounded indignant. " I'm here, and I wasn't the last time you came to Fox Keep."

"Well, yes," Mavrix admitted. He seemed something less than delighted to make his son's acquaintance. "Even so-"

"The Gradi don't trouble the northlands these days," Gerin put in. He carefully did not add, No thanks to you . Mavrix had tried to stand against Voldar, the ferocious chief goddess of the Gradi, but had not been strong enough. Baivers, the Elabonian god of barley and brewing, had held off Voldar and the rest of the Gradi pantheon, along with considerable help from the fearsome deities of the monsters under Biton's cave. Gerin wondered whether Mavrix despised Baivers or the monsters' gods more.

"Well, yes." If anything, Mavrix sounded even less thrilled than he had with Ferdulf. "Even so-"

Ferdulf ran over to him and caught him by the hand. "Father!" he cried again.

Mavrix inspected him. If the Sithonian god was impressed, he concealed it exceedingly well. "Yes, I am your father," he said. "You summoned me, so I came. Now what do you want?"

He sounded like Gerin granting a brief audience to a man for whom he could not spare any more time: he wanted Ferdulf to come to the point so he could get back to whatever he had been doing. Ferdulf caught that, too. "Here I am, the son you got on my mother," he exclaimed. "Have you no praise for me? Have you no words of wisdom?"

Words of wisdom were the last thing Gerin would have asked of Mavrix. If the Sithonian god had chosen to give him any, he would have reckoned true wisdom likely to lie in ignoring them. Here and now, the issue did not arise, for Mavrix only shrugged; the sinuous motion put Gerin in mind of a serpent. "I may be your father," the god said, "but I am not your nursemaid."

Ferdulf reeled back as if Mavrix had slapped him. However heartless Mavrix's words sounded, Gerin thought they did hold good advice. At least they told Ferdulf in no uncertain terms that he could not rely on Mavrix for anything but his existence.

Whatever else they did, they infuriated the little demigod. "You can't ignore me!" he shouted. His feet came off the ground. He shot through the air at Mavrix like an angry arrow.

In his right hand, the Sithonian god bore a wand wreathed in ivy and vine leaves and topped with a pinecone. The thyrsus looked like a harmless ornament. In Mavrix's hands, though, it was a weapon more deadly than the longest, sharpest, heaviest spear any human warrior could carry.

Mavrix tapped Ferdulf with the wand. Ferdulf groaned and crashed to the ground. "A child who annoys his father gets the stick, as he deserves," the god said to the demigod.

Ferdulf was used to having more supernatural power than anyone around him. He rose into the air again and hurled himself at his sire. "You can't do that to me!" he cried.

"Oh, but I can," Mavrix answered, and tapped his son with the thyrsus again. Again, Ferdulf hit the ground, more heavily this time than before. "You need to understand that. Just because I came when you called, you have not the right to abuse me, nor shall you ever." Ferdulf moaned and lay in a heap. Alert as a longtooth, Mavrix stood there watching him. A faint rank odor, of wine lees and old corruption, floated from the god, making Gerin's nose twitch.

Slowly, with another groan, Ferdulf sat up. "Why did you come when I called?" he asked in a voice full of despair. "I hoped you would see me and be proud of me. I hoped-" He shook his head, as if to clear it.

"What a naive little creature you are," Mavrix said, which brought one more groan from Ferdulf. The Sithonian god turned to Gerin. "I should have thought he would have learned better, dwelling by you as he does. For a mortal, you have a moderate amount of sense."

"Even if he is a demigod, he's only four years old," Gerin said, concealing his own bemusement at hearing anything even remotely resembling praise from Mavrix.

Ferdulf heard it, too, heard it and did not like it. "How dare you talk to him, talk to this, this man , more kindly than you do to me?"

"I dare because I am a god. I dare because I am your father," Mavrix returned evenly. By early appearances, Ferdulf annoyed him even more than the Fox did. His dark, dark eyes stared at, stared through, his son. "How dare you presume to question me ?"

"I am flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood," Ferdulf said. "If I have not got the right, who has?"

"No one," Mavrix answered. "Now be quiet for a little while."

Ferdulf tried to speak, but produced only squeaks and grunts, not intelligible words. Gerin was impressed he could do even so much; when Mavrix commanded silence of a mortal man, silence was what he got. Seeing Mavrix relatively well-disposed to him, the Fox asked, "Lord of the sweet grape, what aid can you give me against the Elabonian Empire?"

At that, Ferdulf did fall silent. He wanted to hear the answer, too, being anything but enamored of the Empire.

Mavrix looked troubled. That troubled Gerin. Sithonian legend spoke of what a coward Mavrix was. But what was on the god's face did not look like fear to the Fox. It looked like resignation. That troubled Gerin more.

"I can do less than you might hope," Mavrix said at last. "If I could do more than you might hope, do you think I would not have done it for fair Sithonia rather than for this grapeless and otherwise unattractive wilderness?"

"But-" Gerin shook his head. "You Sithonian gods are still very much a part of your own country, while the gods of Elabon hardly seem to notice this world any more: one has to shout to get their attention, you might say."

Mavrix nodded. "That is so. And, once gained, their attention is frequently not worth having." He sniffed scornfully.

"As may be," Gerin said, not wanting to disagree openly with the Sithonian god of wine and fertility. Once he'd summoned Baivers, the Elabonian god had done more for him than Mavrix had. In any case, that wasn't what he wanted to know. He asked, "With the gods of Sithonia immanent in the world while those of Elabon are not, how have the Elabonians"-he carefully did not say we Elabonians -"ruled your land so long?"

"That is a cogent question-a painfully cogent question," Mavrix said. "The best reply I can give is that the folk of Sithonia, while they have a great many gifts from their gods, conspicuously lack that of governing themselves. Elabonians, on the contrary, have next to no discernible gifts of any sort… save only that of government. It would take a stronger god than any known in Sithonia to make its people unite."

Regretfully, Gerin nodded. That fit too well with what the imperial wizards had told him. "Is there nothing you can do?" he said, wondering, What good is an impotent god, especially an impotent fertility god?

"I have already done all you require of me, and more besides," Mavrix answered. "Without my son-who may, by the way, speak again-you would have no hope whatever of repelling the forces of the Elabonian Empire. With him, you have that hope. Nothing in the mundane world is altogether certain, however, either for gods or for men. Do not be smug; do not be overconfident; you may yet lose this fight, too."