Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

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."