Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

"Elabonians? Foosh!" Adiatunnus said. "We make no special shivers for Elabonians. It's not as if you were so many Gradi, now."

"To the crows with you," Gerin exclaimed. Both men laughed. They'd tried to kill each other before; they might well try to kill each other again one day. Meanwhile, though, they saw they had more urgent things to worry about than their old animosity. That in itself eased Gerin's mind. He had been far from sure Adiatunnus would be able to look to what might lie ahead rather than remembering the past. For that matter, he'd been far from sure he'd be able to do that himself.

"If you're right, Fox, and we beat the Gradi…" The Trokm- chieftain's voice trailed away, as if he had trouble believing such a thing possible. After a moment, he started up again: "If we do that, 'twill be a braw thing you've managed: aye, a braw thing indeed."

"We'll see what happens, that's all," the Fox said. "I've always tried to take the fight to the other fellow when I stood any chance of doing it."

"That I ken," Adiatunnus said, "for you've done it to me more times nor I care to recall. May we have the same luck against the Gradi."

"Sounds like a toast to me," Van said, "and only a fool would make a toast without washing it down." It was not a subtle hint, but Van was not a subtle man: in that he matched the Trokmoi more closely than the Elabonians among whom he lived. As Adiatunnus had taken on more Elabonian ways than most of the woodsrunners south of the Niffet, he might have found Van's approach imperfectly polished. If he did, he was too polished himself to show it. Smiling, he waved Gerin, Van, and the rest of the Elabonian warriors toward his keep.

Gerin looked back at the Venien River. It wasn't a great stream like the Niffet into which it flowed; it seemed hardly enough to serve as the boundary between not just two peoples but almost between two worlds. But back there on the eastern side, Gerin had been prince of the north, overlord of all he surveyed. If he claimed to rule here, he would have to make that claim good against the Gradi.

As he had even in his own holding, he kept a weather eye on the sky. Storm clouds building in the west might give warning the Gradi gods had won their war. He saw none; the day remained fine. What he did see was Adiatunnus, also nervously eyeing the western horizon.

Catching his glance, the Trokm- looked briefly shamefaced. "It's only that I'm after remembering the last time we tried coming this way," he said. "Another summer blizzard like that-" He broke off, plainly not wanting to think of it. Gerin didn't want to, either, but couldn't help himself.

A car holding Widin Simrin's son rolled up alongside Gerin's. Widin pointed ahead. "Gradi up that way, lord prince, based at what was a peasant village." He spoke with authority; the scouts, Elabonian and Trokm- both, who had been slipping off over the Venien to spy out the raiders' doings reported to him when they returned-if they returned.

The Fox waved half the chariots off to the left and the other half to the right, wanting to hit the Gradi from two directions at once. He led the left-hand column himself. At his father's order, Duren urged the horses up into a gallop. "Speed and surprise will get us more here than stealth," Gerin judged.

Surprised the Gradi certainly were. When they spied the chariots rushing toward them they let out loud bellows of alarm. Some of them dashed back into the peasant huts they'd appropriated and then came back out with axes and a few bows. And a handful did something Gerin had never before seen Gradi do: they turned tail and ran for their lives.

Even as he nocked his first arrow, the Fox pointed to them and called, "I want some of those men taken alive. We may be able to learn a lot from them." A handful of chariots peeled off after the fleeing Gradi.

The fight with the ones who hadn't fled was as fierce as usual, but did not last long: between them, the Elabonians and Trokmoi had their foes badly outnumbered, and the arrival of the second column moments after the first threw the Gradi into confusion, for a good many of them could not decide which group of opponents to resist.

When they saw they had no hope of winning the fight, the Gradi began slaying one another to keep from being taken prisoner. Rather more of them than usual, though, did let themselves be captured. That piqued Gerin's curiosity in the same way as the earlier spectacle of running Gradi had done.

After helping see to his own men, he went to question the warriors who'd fled or been captured. They sat glumly on the ground, hands bound behind them with leather thongs. "Who speaks Elabonian?" Gerin demanded.

Several Gradi stirred. "I speak it, somely," one of them said, proving his own point.

Gerin wasted no time with ancillary questions. "Why did some of you run? Why did some of you give up?"

The Gradi looked at one another, then down at the ground. The Fox knew shame when he saw it. The prisoner who had spoken before answered, "It is not what the chiefs tell us. It is not what the gods tell us." A couple of others who understood Elabonian exclaimed, trying to silence him, but he went on, "It is so. We were to strike, not to be striked. The gods do not do what they say they do. They trickfool us. Why we do for them?"

"How did your gods fool you?" Gerin did his best to make the question sound casual. He had to work not to lean forward and throw it out like a man casting a baited line into a pond.

And that Gradi seized the bait. "They say they help us," he answered. "They say you not can backfight. They say they chase your pisspot gods, eat them, throw dead of them on dunghill. They trickfool us."

His gray eyes were full of angry indignation. For a little while, Gerin had trouble understanding that. Then he realized he was used to living in a part of the world where the gods seldom played an active role. That was not true of Voldar and the rest of the Gradi pantheon. Now the raiders were having to do things for themselves, without their gods to help them. If this first taste of how they performed under such circumstances meant anything, they were going to have some trouble adjusting.

Gerin hoped they had a lot of trouble adjusting. Turning to Adiatunnus, he said, "You see? We're fighting just them now, not their goddess." Here across the Venien, he didn't feel like naming her, even if she was otherwise occupied.

Adiatunnus noticed that. He said, "You started well before, Fox, and then it all went sour. Finish well, now, and you'll show yourself right."

"Fair enough." The Fox spoke to the warriors guarding the Gradi prisoners: "Send them back over the Venien. The work we get out of them as slaves will pay back a little of what they've done to us."

He watched the prisoners closely as he spoke. Some of them admitted to understanding Elabonian. He saw no tries for escape, no tries for suicide, among those men or any others. The likeliest explanation was that they were cast into confusion because their gods were less with them than those gods usually were.

He very much wanted the likeliest explanation to be true. Because he so much wanted it to be true, he distrusted it all the more.

"Only one way to find out," he said. Adiatunnus gave him a curious look. He pretended not to see it.

Whether or not the Gradi had been readying themselves to cross the Venien a few days before, they were not ready to defend against a strike from the eastern side of the river. Each group of them, gathered in villages or encamped in the woods, fought Gerin's army with an effort individually often heroic but invariably futile: those groups were crushed, one after another.

"Why don't they come together, Father?" Duren asked as the army made camp after one such little battle. "They'd be tougher meat if they did."