Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

"Blighters!" Baivers bellowed again, and rushed forward. Voldar loped toward him, as deadly graceful as a longtooth. He picked her up; she let out a most ungodlike squawk of startlement as he slammed her down to the snowy ground. Inside Baivers, Gerin was cheering wildly. He'd wanted the god of barley angry, and now he'd got what he wanted. Not at his finest had Mavrix given Voldar such an overthrow.

But she was on her feet in an instant-feet around which little shoots of barley began to show, pushing their way up through the eternal snow of the divine Gradihome. Voldar hewed at those shoots with her axe. Each one she cut bled real blood, and at each stroke Baivers groaned as if she were cutting him down.

"Forward!" Voldar shouted to her divine companions. "Let's get them, and get them now. We'll-"

She got no further than that. Her cropping the growing barley had hurt Baivers, but had not quenched his determination-very much the reverse. He grabbed the axe handle. Voldar screeched in rage. Gerin felt a harsh tingling run up Baivers' arms, as if he'd grabbed hold of a lightning bolt. Baivers wrestled the axe from Voldar and threw it far-maybe infinitely far-away.

Gerin had hoped a good part of Voldar's power dwelt in that axe, and that without it she would be diminished. If she was, she gave no outward sign of it. She dealt Baivers a buffet that would have caved in the skull of an ordinary mortal.

The only ordinary mortal in that clearing, though, was Gerin, and he wasn't there in the flesh. A lot of flesh was flying, and fur, and divine ichor, from both the underground powers and the Gradi gods. The Fox couldn't help thinking Sithonian deities would have handled the battle with more elegance and panache. Any elegance or panache would have been more than was on display at the moment. Neither the monsters' gods nor those of the Gradi had much in the way of subtlety. They found the nearest foe and went at him, much as monsters and Gradi would have done had they collided in the northlands.

One of the Gradi gods burst into flame. The underground power he was fighting screeched. Another of the monsters' gods, though, tackled the Gradi god and rolled with him in the snow, after which his fire was extinguished for a while. And the subterranean god who had been burned healed with supernatural speed.

An underground power sprang on Voldar, claw raking cuts along her haunch. She screamed in mingled pain and fury and kicked out behind her like an angry horse. The monsters' god flew through the air and smashed headfirst into the trunk of a fir. He did not get up right away. He did not get up at all. Gerin wondered if he would ever get up again.

A Gradi god to whom the Fox had not been introduced tried to freeze Baivers where he stood, blowing an icy blast at him as if from the side of some snow-covered northern mountain. However hostile his intent, his power did not measure up to it. In response, Baivers pointed a finger at him. All the hair on his arms, on his face, on his head, turned to growing barley. He wailed and clawed at himself, but remained green and growing.

"How dare you interfere with our plans?" Voldar demanded of Baivers.

"Who's interfering in whose part of the world?" the god of barley retorted. "You leave my earth alone, maybe I'll think of leaving you alone. And maybe not, too. You deserve what you're getting, all the trouble you've caused there 'twixt the Niffet and the Kirs."

"Not half so much as we will cause," Voldar snarled. "We'll take revenge for eons, see if we don't."

She broke off then, with a howl of outrage, for one of the monsters' gods, one who beside her was like a small dog beside a man, bit her in the ankle. Gerin admired the courage of the underground power, and wished he'd had the chance to meet more of the monsters' gods in anything but the most perfunctory way before leading them into this fight.

The monsters' god was small, but held power not to be despised. Voldar's leg did not work as it should have after he sank his teeth into her. She beat on him with all her strength, but he would not let go his hold. "What are you, you savage worm?" she cried.

Speaking mind to mind, the underground power did not have to leave off biting her to reply, "I am Death."

Excitement rippled through Gerin when he caught that answer. Even Voldar might have trouble against such a foe. Were gods truly immortal? Would he find out now? Something that might have been alarm in her voice, Voldar shrilly cried, "Smerts! To me!"

Seeing Smerts, the Fox realized he-no, she, for the emaciated frame carried shrunken breasts-was Death's Gradi equivalent. Where Voldar had been unable to free herself from the underground power's onslaught, Smerts tore the fierce little god away from the queen of the Gradi pantheon. "You are mine," Smerts crooned in a fierce, hungry whisper.

"No," the monsters' Death said, just as hungrily, "you are mine." And he bit the hand that held him. Smerts squeezed him with her other hand. Gerin wondered what would happen if they slew each other. Would that bring immortality into the world?

Whether or not Voldar was immortal, she was imbued with enormous vitality. As soon as Smerts had plucked Death from her, she regained full use of that leg, and used it to smash in the ribs of an underground power who had torn a Gradi god almost in two.

The kicked power stumbled backward, groaning, and knocked Death out of Smerts' hands. Smerts seized the new underground power, while Death clamped his teeth into the first Gradi god he could reach. Gerin wished he had a body with which to groan. Mortality's power in the world would continue to hold sway.

He risked a question of Baivers: "Are we winning?"

"Don't know," the Elabonian god replied. He looked around the field, which meant Gerin perforce looked around the field, too. What he saw was what he'd seen since the brawl began: chaos loosed in the divine Gradihome. "Don't know if we're winning," Baivers repeated, "but I don't reckon we're losing, neither."

That was as much as Gerin had hoped for when he led the underground powers here. It seemed to be plenty to satisfy the monsters' gods, too. Some of the Gradi gods knocked down or uprooted trees with their bare hands and swung them, like enormous spearshafts, at their foes. That distressed the monsters' gods, who were unused to trees in all ways, and especially as weapons.

But Baivers knew about trees. Some of the power he used to make barley spring to life also worked on them. Their branches and roots turned unnaturally lively, grappling with the Gradi gods who tried to wield the trunks. And while the trees discommoded the Gradi gods, the underground powers sprang on them, rending and tearing.

Before the monsters' gods reached the divine Gradihome, their grim and savage intensity, their bloodthirsty devotion to slaughter, had alarmed the Fox, who wondered whether they weren't apt to be a worse bargain for the northlands than Voldar and her companions. He had thought the underground powers would only have grown more ferocious once they joined battle with the Gradi gods.

So far as he could tell, that wasn't happening. The clearing was filled not just with quasiphysical screams and shouts and groans, but also with the thoughts and feelings of the battling gods, sometimes as weapons, sometimes merely there. Gerin did not catch the same rage now from the monsters' gods as he'd felt when they were coming toward this fight. What he did get from them was so surprising, he had to pause and consider before he was willing to admit, even to himself, that he fully grasped it.

"They're enjoying themselves!" he told Baivers, almost indignantly. "They're like a serf village on a holiday, when they've got a couple of pigs roasting over the fire and plenty of your good ale and no work to do. They're having the time of their lives."