Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

Off Rihwin went. Every line in his body proclaimed mute outrage. Dagref, who had been standing by listening to the exchange, remarked, "He will try to get into the wine, you know."

"And the sun will come up tomorrow," Gerin agreed wearily. "Tell me something I couldn't figure out for myself. He stayed away from it as long as he did because no one else could get at it, either. Now that Ferdulf has-"

"But Ferdulf is a demigod, and son to the god of wine," Dagref said. "Doesn't Rihwin see any distinction between that case and his own?"

"The only thing Rihwin sees is his own thirst," Gerin answered. "That worries me, too, but I can only do so much about it. The best way I've come up with to make sure he stays away from the blood of the sweet grape is to keep him too busy to get near the wineskins."

That being so, he sent Rihwin out on patrol with a couple of squadrons of his riders. Whatever else Rihwin was, no one had ever accused him of being dull-witted. He had no trouble seeing what Gerin was doing or why he was doing it, and gave his fellow Fox a sour look. But, since Gerin's order also made perfectly good sense in military terms, Rihwin could do nothing about it but obey.

Maeva did not ride out with Rihwin and the others who fought on horseback. Gerin would have given Rihwin a kick in the fundament had he sent any wounded warrior into action without dire need. Maeva still looked offended at being left behind. "How does the leg feel?" he asked her. "Tell me the truth, now."

A more experienced warrior probably would have lied despite that admonition. Maeva was young enough and serious-minded enough to heed it. "Sore," she confessed.

He set a hand on her forehead. "Hold still," he said when she tried to pull away. "You're not feverish. Is your leg hot around the wound?"

"A little," she said, and then, in a very firm voice, "but only a little."

"All right," he answered. "That sounds like it's healing as it should. Stay off it as much as you can. The less strain you put on it, the faster it will get better." And the sooner you'll have a scar that will startle your husband on his wedding night , he thought, or maybe some other young man on a warm spring night a good deal sooner than that . If he'd said what was in his mind, he would have embarrassed them both. By keeping his mouth shut, he managed to embarrass only himself. Shaking his head, he went off to get the army moving faster as they broke camp.

He soon saw again that the imperials, while they had now lost two battles, were still very much in the fight. They had so many chariots out to slow down the northerners' march, Rihwin sent a rider back to ask for reinforcements. "They'll smash us up if you don't send more men forward, lord kings," the messenger said.

"We'll send more men forward, by the gods," Aragis snarled. "We'll send the whole cursed army forward, see if we don't." He shouted orders.

Gerin frowned. That wasn't how he would have handled things; it struck him as sticking his head into a longtooth's mouth and inviting the beast to bite down. Scouts went ahead of an army to develop the opposition, to see what was out there. Moving up with the entire force meant the scouts didn't have the chance to do their job and invited an ambush.

He started to protest, then made himself keep quiet. This was what he'd bought when he agreed Aragis should have command of the whole host. He could not claim the Archer was holding back his own men and endangering only Gerin's. Aragis was sending everyone into the fight. He was sending everyone into the fight so aggressively that, if the imperials did have an ambush set, it might not do them much good. He didn't seem to have many ideas as a general, but he knew what to do with the ones he had.

And the imperials proved not to have set a trap after all. Their chariots had been skirmishing briskly with Rihwin's horsemen, but drew back when so much support for the riders made its appearance.

"There-you see, Fox?" Aragis said, more than a little complacently. "We will drive them back to Cassat, and, once we've done that, we'll drive them over the mountains and out of the northlands for good."

"By the gods, maybe we will." Gerin heard the bemusement in his own voice. He wouldn't have believed it when the war began, but he was starting to believe it now. One more victory over the forces of the Elabonian Empire, and he didn't see how the imperial forces could sustain themselves on this side of the High Kirs any more.

"Of course we will." Aragis didn't seem to have any doubts. Aragis never seemed to have any doubts about anything. Maybe he didn't have doubts because he was right so often. Maybe he didn't have doubts because nobody dared tell him he was wrong, which wasn't quite the same thing.

"What's Cassat like these days?" Gerin asked. "I haven't been through it since just after the Empire closed off the High Kirs."

"You remember what a sad place it was then?" Aragis said. "Remember how it pretended to be the capital of a province that didn't want to have anything to do with it?"

"That I do," Gerin said. "Dyaus only knows what the governor they'd sent there had done to get himself shipped into exile-no, wait, I remember, it was something to do with getting an army chopped to pieces, wasn't it? Whatever it was, he hated everything that had anything to do with the northlands." That wasn't quite true. The imperial functionary had had quite a yen for Elise. So had Gerin, in those days. She'd disabused the governor with a knife to his throat. Disabusing Gerin had taken longer, and hurt worse by the time the job was through, too.

"Didn't he, though?" Aragis said. "Well, like I say, Cassat was a sad place then, and that was with traffic going over the mountains into the Empire. When the imperials closed the pass, the place didn't have any reason for being at all. What it reminds me of nowadays is a night ghost that wails because it isn't what it used to be-it isn't much of anything, just the remnant of something that was alive once upon a time."

Gerin gave him a look out of the corner of his eye. "You'd better be careful, Archer, or you're going to end up writing poetry."

"Heh," Aragis said. "You're a funny fellow. Order those horsemen of yours forward again, and we'll get on with this business. The gods only know how much I want to get back to my own holdings. Without anybody to keep an eye on 'em, the peasants are sure to be sitting around with their thumbs up their arses."

"They can't sit idle all the time," Gerin said. "They have to eat this winter, too. They know it."

"Aye, and they'll start thinking of that about two days before harvest time, too," Aragis said. "Meanwhile, the weeding and the manuring won't have gone on half so well as they should. Instead of working, they'll be swilling ale and screwing each other's wives."

"They might as well be barons," the Fox murmured.

Van turned a snort into a cough in the nick of time. Dagref's shoulders hunched, as they would have done at the start of a laugh, but he managed to hold it in. "What was that?" Aragis said sharply.

"Never mind," Gerin told him. "You already think I'm too bloody light-minded. Where do we go from here?"

"After the imperials," the Archer replied without hesitation. "We bring them to battle wherever they will stand, either in front of Cassat or behind it, we smash them, and we run them back over the mountains. If they want to come up into our country to trade, well and good. If they come here again with edged bronze in their hands, we'll give them a new set of lumps and send them home again."

"Maybe we will," Gerin said, as he had before. Listening to Aragis made him believe it, anyhow.

Aragis certainly believed it. "We will ," he declared in such ringing tones that almost everyone within earshot turned his head toward him. "Put your men on the left, Fox; I shall put mine on the right. We'll meet behind the imperials. With the circle closed around them, we'll make sure not many ever do get back over the High Kirs to tell the tale."