Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

"Letting these two come onto the temple grounds would be a way of remembering, then," Gerin said. "And if it displeases Biton, the god has ways of making that known without going through priests or guards."

The Fox knew that was true; Biton smote with a loathsome and fatal curse those who tried to steal his treasures from within the sacred precinct. Asking Geroge and Tharma to pass inside that marble wall put them in some danger, but Gerin could not believe Biton would reckon them a worse threat to the northlands than the Gradi and their gods.

"You would have made a formidable priest, lord prince," Lamissio said.

"Maybe," Gerin said, though he aimed to profit himself first and the gods only afterwards and as he had to. He also contemplated with something less than eager enthusiasm the mutilation Lamissio had suffered so he could serve Biton and the Sibyl.

Selatre said, "Will you let us-will you let all of us-enter the temple precinct, Lamissio? No one will seek to harm or steal anything inside."

"Very well," the priest said, which made several of the guardsmen give him surprised stares. He went on, "As you say, and as I find impossible to deny, Biton has the power to punish these monsters, should that prove his will."

"Of course he does," Gerin said reassuringly. "He banished them underground, didn't he?" What he said was true. What he didn't say was that banishing the monsters back to haunts in which they'd dwelt for ages was different from destroying a couple of them. If Lamissio couldn't figure that out for himself, that was his lookout.

A couple of temple guards came up to take charge of the wagon and the chariot in which Gerin and his companions had approached the shrine of the farseeing god. Lamissio led Gerin and Selatre, Van and Duren, and Geroge and Tharma inside the gleaming white wall delimiting the temple precinct.

No hideous blight fell on the two monsters. Gerin breathed a silent sigh of relief at that. Selatre breathed something, too: "All the same. It's all the same." Unlike Gerin and Van, she had no memory of its ever being different.

Like them, and like Duren, too, she had seen the treasures displayed outside the temple. Past a glance to make sure they were the same, too, she concentrated on the business at hand. To Geroge and Tharma, though, the statues of painted marble and of gold and ivory, the bronze pots on golden tripods, the stacked ingots of gold, were all new and marvelous.

"Pretty," Tharma said in a voice halfway between a growl and a croon. For the first time, a couple of the temple guards smiled at her.

Having talked Lamissio into letting the monsters into the temple precinct, Gerin hoped for further success. "The sooner we can go down under the shrine, the sooner we'll be able to start driving the Gradi and their gods out of the northlands," he said, a sentence with enough unexamined assumptions in it to give a Sithonian logician a bad case of dyspepsia.

It made Lamissio dyspeptic, too. "This cannot be," he declared. "I said as much before; were you not listening? We do not allow visitors below the shrine, save on their journey to the Sibyl, and we most of all do not allow the wards holding the monsters at bay to be tampered with, lest those monsters flood out into the world at large, as they did a decade ago."

"Aye, that's a risk," Van rumbled, "but the cursed Gradi are already loose in the world at large. They may not have sharp teeth like Geroge and Tharma here, but I don't want 'em for neighbors."

"I know nothing of the Gradi, and care to learn nothing," the priest replied. "I know the monsters required Biton's personal intervention to be bundled back into their caves once more. And I know the destruction they worked here and in the town and all through this valley, and I will not see its like repeated." As far as he was concerned, the temple, the town of Ikos, and the valley in which they lay might have been the whole world. If they stayed safe, he cared nothing for what happened in the rest of the northlands.

Duren saw that as plainly as Gerin. "Think past the valley!" he told Lamissio. A glance at the eunuch's face told Gerin the plea was in vain. Lamissio's mental horizon had no stretch in it.

What to do, then? The Fox couldn't take Lamissio aside and try to bribe him into cooperation, though he had planned to do just that. The temple guardsmen were obviously as leery as the priest about loosing the monsters once more. And, for all Gerin knew, their fear was liable to be justified. He was far from sure of his own course, despite Baivers' urging. All he knew for certain was that, so long as he could find a blow to strike against the Gradi and Voldar, he would try with everything in him to strike it, and would worry later about what came afterwards.

But he could not storm the temple, not if Biton did not care to permit it. If Lamissio remained inflexible, he was thwarted. And Lamissio could have been no more inflexible had he been carved from basalt like Biton's ancient image in the temple.

Dejected, the Fox turned to go, to try to figure out what other ploys he could find against the Gradi. "Wait," Selatre said suddenly, in a voice not quite her own. Gerin turned toward her. Her eyes were wide and staring, and looked straight through him. When she spoke again, it was in the powerful baritone Gerin had heard before, the voice Biton used in speaking through his Sibyls:

When the god abandoned possession of Selatre, she staggered as if stunned. Gerin put an arm around her, steadying her and keeping her from falling. She looked around in surprise. "Did I say something?" she asked. "What did I say?"

"That was the farseeing god," one of the temple guardsmen said, his voice clotted with awe. "No one else-the lord Biton."

"Biton?" Selatre's eyes opened very wide. "Did the lord Biton speak through me?" She seemed to be taking mental stock. "It might be so. I feel the way I did when-after-" She stopped in confusion. "But he couldn't have."

"He did," Gerin said. He let his hand tighten for a moment. "We all heard it." His companions and the guards nodded. He repeated the verses that had come from her mouth, adding, "Not much doubt about what they mean, either."

He was looking straight at Lamissio. Of all those present when the mantic fit hit Selatre, only Biton's priest doubted it was genuine. "How could the farseeing god speak through a vessel he himself discarded?" Lamissio said. "How could he speak through a woman not a maiden?"

But the guard who had first acknowledged that Biton was speaking through Selatre answered. "Gods make rules, and gods break rules, too. That's what makes them gods. And the prince of the north has the right of it here, too. No way to mistake the meaning of the oracular response."

Not all the response was clear. Gerin saw that, even if no one else did. Biton had given him leave to go down under the shrine and bargain with whatever powers were associated with the monsters. He had not said those powers would keep any bargain once made.

Van took a step toward Lamissio, plainly intending to force his cooperation if he could get it no other way. Gerin started to step away from Selatre to block the outlander. Before he could, Duren did. Their eyes met for a moment. The Fox knew he and his son were seeing the same thing: that if even the guardsmen recognized that Biton had, rules or no rules, filled Selatre for a moment, the priest could not help but give way.

And so it proved. Muttering something ungracious under his breath, Lamissio said, "Very well, it shall be as you say-and pray the farseeing god will permit no disasters to spring from it." Then his dour front tottered and collapsed, as the temple behind him had during the earthquake a decade before. "The god has expanded my notion of the possible," he murmured, which struck Gerin as far from the worst way to phrase it.