Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

Gerin rolled up the last scroll. "I don't know if this is going to work," he told Selatre, "but then, I don't know what choice I have, either. A man will pick a bad course when all the others look worse."

"It will be all right," Selatre said.

He shrugged by way of reply. She didn't know that, and had no rational basis for believing it. Neither did he. After a moment, though, he admitted to himself that hearing it from her made him feel better.

As was his way, Gerin carefully assembled everything he thought he would need and everything he thought he might need before he tried to summon Mavrix. He sent Rihwin to the peasant village to bring back a girl who would be enticing enough naked to tempt the fertility god if that proved necessary. Rihwin's experience with the peasant women was wider than his own. Moreover, by having his friend pick the girl, he made sure he would not have Selatre asking how he knew what she looked like without clothes.

Though the woman, whose name was Fulda, wore a long, woad-dyed linen tunic when Rihwin led her up to the keep, Gerin had to admit she did look likely to shape well in the role if required. By the half-amused, half-tart sniff Selatre let out, she thought the same.

The little shack where Gerin tried magic when he got up the nerve to try magic was set well away from Castle Fox. It was also set well away from the palisade, the stables, and everything else in Fox Keep. If something went wrong-and Gerin's conjurations, like those of any half-trained mage, had a way of going wrong-he wanted the destruction to be as limited as possible.

When he, Rihwin, Selatre, and Fulda went out to the shack, the rest of the people packing Fox Keep made a point of keeping their distance, and of not looking at the ramshackle building, either. Nothing had gone too hideously wrong over the years, but everyone got the idea that meddling with Gerin while he worked at his magic-or, for that matter, meddling with him when he worked at anything-was less than a good idea.

He began to chant from the Sithonian epic of Lekapenos. He'd had the verses literally beaten into him by his teachers, and so did not need the scroll he held to be sure he had the words right. He held it nonetheless, to remind Mavrix of another reason he was being summoned.

On a rickety table, he set out wheat (not barley; Mavrix had nothing but scorn for Baivers), ripe and candied fruit, and several eggs from the castle henhouse. "Do you want me to strip off now, lord prince?" Fulda asked, reaching up to the neck of her tunic.

"Let's wait and see if we can bring the god here some other way first," Gerin answered, to Rihwin's evident disappointment. One of Selatre's eyebrows rose for a moment. Gerin didn't know exactly what that meant. He didn't much want to find out, either.

He used his rusty Sithonian for as much of the invocation as he could, wanting to make Mavrix feel as much at home as he could in the northlands. Despite repeated beseechings, though, the god declined to appear. Gerin wondered if that wasn't just as well, but went on anyhow.

"Fulda," Selatre said, and nodded.

The peasant woman pulled the tunic off over her head. One glance told Gerin she was as lushly made as he'd guessed. Past that one glance, he didn't look at her. If he made a mistake with his invocation, whether her body was beautiful or not wouldn't matter. Rihwin's eyes lit up. Gerin suspected he would try to see Fulda naked under other circumstances as soon as he could. That thought appeared in his mind, but vanished a moment later: Mavrix still showed no sign of coming forth.

Gerin wondered if the Sithonian god now refused to have anything to do with him at all. He also wondered whether he should have brought a pretty boy into the shack instead of Fulda. Mavrix's tastes sometimes veered in that direction.

Stubbornly, he kept on working as many variants of the spell as he could imagine. A man without his perseverance-or a man in less desperate straits-would have quit a long time before. The Fox realized he wouldn't be able to go on much longer, either, not without making an error that would at least invalidate everything he'd already done and at most… he didn't want to think about all the unpleasant things that might happen then.

As he was about to give up, the inside of the shack seemed all at once to grow vastly larger, though its exterior dimensions had not changed in any way. Gerin had felt that happen before. The hair prickled up on the back of his neck. Here was Mavrix, so now he had what he'd thought he wanted. How much would he regret seeing his prayers granted?

"You are the noisiest little man," the god said, his deep, honeyed voice sounding somewhere in the middle of Gerin's head rather than in his ears. The Fox was not sure whether Mavrix spoke Sithonian or Elabonian; he took meaning directly, at a level more basic than words.

Gerin spoke Sithonian, in the hope of making Mavrix better inclined toward him. "I thank you, lord of the sweet grape, lord of fertility, lord of wisdom and wit, for deigning to hear me."

"Deigning to hear you?" Mavrix's eyebrows rose almost all the way to his hairline. His handsome features, had they been human, would have been impossibly mobile. But he was not human, even if his rosebud mouth would have made any boy-lover quiver with lascivious delight. His eyes were all black, fathomless, deep beyond deep, warning of power and terror far beyond any to which a mere human could aspire. "Deigning to hear you?" he repeated. "You were doing your best to deafen me, not so?"

"I would not have troubled you were I not deep in trouble myself," Gerin answered, which was no less than truth: even as he spoke, he wondered whether his proposed cure was worse than the Gradi disease.

"And why should I care a fig for your troubles, lord Gerin, prince of the north?" In Mavrix's mouth, the Fox's titles were poisonously sweet. "Why should I not rejoice, in fact?"

"Because I did not make them, for one," Gerin answered. "And, for another, because the gods who did make them now purpose turning the northlands into a cold and dreary country where next to nothing will grow, and where for months at a time all will be covered by ice and snow." Hearing his own accidental rhyme, he wished he'd thought to include metre as well; Mavrix appreciated such artful touches.

"That sounds-distasteful," the Sithonian god admitted. "But, I ask you again, why should I care? These barbarous northlands are scarcely part of my normal purview, you know. You Elabonians are quite bad enough" — the fringes on his fawnskin tunic fluttered as he shivered to show what he thought of Elabonians- "and the woodsrunning savages now infesting the land worse. If something dreadful befalls the lot of you-so what?"

"The Gradi are worse, and so are their gods," Gerin said, stubborn still. "You may not think much of Dyaus, and I have no notion what you think of Taranis, Teutatis, and Esus, but you have your place and they have theirs, and you don't try to drive them off, nor they you."

He didn't mention Baivers, some of whose aspects were close enough to those of Mavrix to make them compete with rather than complementing each other. He especially didn't mention Biton, whose quarrel with Mavrix had led to banishing the monsters infesting the northlands back to their gloomy caverns. If the god remembered those quarrels, he would remind Gerin of them. If he didn't, Gerin wasn't going to remind him.

Mavrix sniffed. "I have never impinged upon these Gradi gods, nor they on me. For all I know, you lie for your own reasons. Humans are like that." He sniffed again, in fine contempt.

But he wasn't so smart as he thought he was, because, while suspicious of Gerin's arguments, he didn't notice the logical flaws and omissions in them. If you were sly enough and quick enough and lucky enough, you could guide him like a man leading a barely broken horse. You'd never be sure he'd go in the direction you wanted him to take, but if you made all the other choices look worse, you had a chance.