Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

The god he had summoned to his aid strode down a path through more snow-covered trees. If Mavrix was cold, he did not show it. Once, as if to amuse himself, he pointed his thyrsus at one of the pines. Clumps of bright flowers sprang into being at the base of its trunk. Gerin wondered if they continued to exist after Mavrix stopped paying attention to them.

Golden-eyed wolves stared out of the woods at Mavrix: wolves as big as bears, as big as horses, divine wolves, the primeval savage essence of wolf concentrated in their bodies as a cook might concentrate a sauce by boiling away all excess. When Gerin felt their terrible eyes on him, he wanted to quail and run, even though he knew he was not there in body. Wolves like that could-would-gulp down his very soul.

Mavrix pulled out a set of reed pipes and blew music such as had never been heard in the grim realm of the Gradi gods, not in all the ages since they shaped the place to their own satisfaction. It was the music of summer and joy and love, the music of wine and hot nights and desire. Had he been able to, Gerin would have wept with the sorrow of knowing that, try as he might, he would never be fully able to remember or reproduce what he heard.

And the wolves! All at once, utterly without warning, they lost their ferocity and came rushing through the snow at Mavrix, not to rend him but to frisk at his heels like so many friendly puppies. They yipped. They leaped. They played foolish games with one another. They paired off and mated. They did everything but guard the road, as the Gradi gods had plainly intended them to do.

Amusement seeped from Mavrix's mind to Gerin's. "Perhaps we should throw cold water on some of them," the Sithonian god said. "Plenty of cold water here."

"Oh, I don't know," Gerin replied. "Why not let them enjoy themselves? I have the feeling this is the first time they've ever been able to."

"That is nothing less than the truth," Mavrix said, and then, "I own that I responded to your summons with resentment, but now I am glad I did. These Gradi gods need to be dealt with. They have no notion of fun." He spoke as the Fox did when passing sentence on some particularly vicious robber.

Gerin wondered if the Sithonian god could instill levity into whatever Voldar used for a heart. If he could, that would be a bigger miracle than any he had yet worked.

But Mavrix had not yet won through to confront the chief goddess of the Gradi. When he stepped out into a clearing, Gerin wondered if Voldar would await him there. But it was not Voldar. It was not anything anthropomorphic at all, but a whirling column of rain and mist and ice and snow, stretching up as far as the eye could see.

From the middle of the column, a voice spoke: "Get you gone. This is not your place. Get you gone."

At Mavrix's feet, the wolves whined and whimpered, as if realizing they'd betrayed themselves with a stranger and were going to be made to regret it by the powers that were their proper masters. Mavrix, however, spoke lightly, mockingly, as was his way. "What have we here? The divine washtub for this miserable place? Or is it but the chamber pot?"

"I am Stribog," the voice declared. "I say you shall not pass. Take your jests and japes somewhere we do not yet touch, then await us there, for one day, rest assured, we shall overwhelm it and quench them."

"Ah-right the second time," Mavrix said cheerfully, perhaps to Gerin, perhaps to Stribog. "It is the chamber pot."

He moved out into the clearing. Stribog did not attack as Lavtrig had. Instead, the Gradi god hurled all the vile weather he had inside him straight at Mavrix. Gerin's soul felt frozen. Here, he saw, was the god who had raised the summer storms against him and his army. Those, though, had been storms of the world, even if divinely raised. This was the very stuff of the gods, used by one to fight another.

And Mavrix noticed this onslaught, where he had been impervious to Lavtrig's. The chill and wet Stribog raised struck at his spirit. He grunted and said, "Now see-someone's gone and spilled it. We'll just have to set it to rights once more."

The wolves fled back to their gloomy haunts. With Mavrix's attention not on them, they forgot the dimmest notion of happiness. Too, they were soaked to their metaphysical skins. Stribog had indeed poured a bucket of cold water on them, a bucket big as the world.

Mavrix lashed out with his wand, as he had against Lavtrig. It must have hurt, too, for Stribog bellowed in pain and rage. But the Gradi god was a more diffuse entity than Lavtrig; he had no central place to strike that would do him lasting damage. And his rain and ice, his winds and lightnings, hurt Mavrix, too. The Sithonian god's anguish washed through Gerin, who knew that, had his spirit been there alone, he would swiftly have been destroyed.

When Mavrix tried to go forward against the storm that was Stribog, he found himself unable. The Gradi god's laughter boomed like thunder. "Here you will perish, you who try to trouble Gradihome!" he cried. "Here you will drown; here you will rest forevermore."

"Oh, be still, arrogant windbag," Mavrix said irritably, and for a moment Stribog was still, the storm silent. Even as it resumed, Mavrix went on, "Not just an arrogant windbag, but a stupid one, too. If you water a fertility god, you promote-"

"Growth!" Gerin's mind exclaimed.

"There, you see?" Mavrix told him. "You have more wit to you than this blowhard. Not much of a compliment, I fear, but you may have it if you want it."

And with that, he began to grow, to soak up all the stormstuff Stribog flung at him and make it his own instead of letting it remain a weapon belonging to the Gradi god. The pain he felt at Stribog's attacks vanished, or rather was transmuted into a satisfaction somewhere between that of a good meal and that which follows the act of love.

Stribog realized too late that he was no longer doing Mavrix any harm. He boomed like thunder again, but this time in alarm. Where before he had reached as high as the eye-or whatever sense passed for vision here-could see and Mavrix seemed small beside him, their relative sizes reversed with startling speed. Now, from his place in the Sithonian god's consciousness, Gerin peered down on a small, furious, futile whirlwind that churned up the snow around Mavrix's ankles.

Mavrix stooped and seized the whirlwind. He flung it away: whither, the Fox had no idea. Maybe Mavrix didn't, either, for he said, "I hope the alepot tempest lands among the Kizzuwatnan gods or some others who properly appreciate heat."

He was, without warning, the apparent size he had been before his fight with Stribog began. He reached up and adjusted the wreath of grape leaves around his forehead to the proper jaunty angle. The landscape of Gradihome seemed undisturbed by the divine tempest that had lashed it; Gerin wished the land of the material world recovered from rain so readily.

"Onward," Mavrix said, and onward they went. But the Sithonian god, despite his triumph, seemed wearier and less sure of himself than he had been. If defeating Lavtrig was like climbing a flight of stairs, besting Stribog had been more like climbing a mountain. If the next challenge proved correspondingly harder still… Gerin did his best not to think about that, for fear Mavrix would sense it and be moved either to anger or to despair.

The god came to a clearing in the snowy woods. Gerin waited to see what sort of Gradi god would confront Mavrix there, but the clearing seemed empty. More snow-covered pines stood at the far edge of the open space, perhaps a bowshot away, perhaps a bit more.

"Well," Mavrix said brightly, "variety in the landscape after all. Who would have thought it?" He brought his pipes to his lips and began to play a cheerful tune as he strolled across the rolling ground.