Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

"I'm still not sure," Gerin answered, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. He'd earned that sweat fighting the Gradi, but it had come easy: the day was a muggy scorcher. "But I'm beginning to think they're so used to talking with their gods, and to listening to them, that they have trouble figuring out what to do when they're on their own."

"Enjoy it while it lasts," Van said. "My guess is, that won't be long. Sooner or later, they'll come out of their fog and remember they're men, not gods' toys. Life gets harder after that."

"I'm the one who's supposed to come up with cheery thoughts like that," Gerin said. "Your job is to say, `No, no, Fox, everything will be fine. We'll whip these Gradi right out of their furs. " He deepened his voice and gave it a slight guttural rasp, doing his best to imitate the outlander.

His friend grunted laughter. "Nobody can always see what he's going to do himself, let alone what the fool standing next to him is liable to come up with. When you threw Baivers and the underground powers at the Gradi gods, you surprised even them, I think."

"As long as they keep on being surprised." Gerin looked at the sky so often these days, he hardly noticed himself doing it. So long as the clouds stayed away, so long as the hot weather held, he would assume the monsters' gods and Baivers still kept Voldar and the other Gradi gods too busy to make trouble down on the merely mortal plane of being.

He knew how rough a gauge that was. Voldar and her crew might overcome the invaders before Stribog recovered from the supernatural wounds he'd received in his fight. If that happened, the first the Fox would know of it was running headlong into the angry Gradi gods. He did not look forward to that sort of confrontation.

Best way to keep it from happening , he told himself, is to beat the Gradi so badly, their gods won't have much of a place to roost in the northlands . He'd known all along what needed doing. Knowing how to do it was another matter, worse luck.

An Elabonian spy brought him news the next day that the Gradi had regarrisoned the tumbledown keep in which he'd defeated them in his earlier foray into the country they held. "They don't have much in the way of imagination, do they?" the Fox said.

When he sent scouts out to approach the place, he discovered how little imagination the Gradi were showing: their sentries seemed no more alert to attack than on his previous incursion. It was as if the idea that their enemies could bring the war to them rather than the other way round had never occurred to them. Gerin aimed both to exploit their na-vet- and, having exploited it, to fill the gap in their education.

"Shall we dismount again and trick them?" Duren asked.

"They'd never fall for the same trick twice," Van protested. Gerin got the feeling the protest sprang more from his inability to look like a Gradi than from any consideration of grand strategy: the outlander felt cheated out of a good fight. No wonder he'd been able to fathom the minds of the monsters' gods-his own worked the same way. Could he have been projected up into the plane of the gods, he would have had a splendid time battling Voldar and her companions.

In the end, the Fox decided to try the same plan again, taking advantage of the confusion the Gradi seemed to feel without their gods leading them by the noses. These were, after all, not the same men in the keep as the ones his force had overwhelmed before. He led the band of foot soldiers who approached the keep. Many of them were wearing captured Gradi helmets and carrying captured Gradi axes in place of their own weapons, doing their best to make the ruse convincing.

When the band of men on foot approached, the drawbridge to the keep was up. He cursed on seeing that. A Gradi up on the wall shouted something at him and his men. A couple of the Trokmoi spoke a little of the Gradi tongue. One of them shouted back, presumably saying something like, It's all right-let us in .

And the drawbridge came down. "We are lucky," Duren breathed.

"We certainly are," Gerin said. "We're lucky enough to run in there and see how many of us are going to get killed. Aren't you glad to have luck like that?" Duren nodded eagerly. Gerin cursed-that wasn't the answer his son would give when he had a little more sense.

But then, if he'd been sensible himself, he wouldn't have attacked this keep in the first place. He yanked his sword out of the scabbard and ran for the drawbridge. His men followed, their shouts making the morning hideous. The drawbridge started to rise, but it could come down faster than it went up.

Gerin got over the bridge and into the courtyard. He ran into the gatehouse with half a dozen men at his heels. They quickly slew the pair of Gradi who had been working the big capstan around which the drawbridge chain was wound. With another shout, the Fox let the capstan spin in the opposite direction. The drawbridge thumped all the way down again, and this time stayed down.

In swarmed the warriors who had approached on foot. Gerin knew the rest of his army would soon join them: a runner would report initial success to the chariotry hanging back just out of sight. Meanwhile, how many Gradi were in the keep and how ferociously would they fight?

A good many of them fought as ferociously as they ever had. One snarling knot of men near the entrance to the great hall of the castle did not come undone till the last Gradi fighting there had fallen. But fewer Gradi manned the keep than had been here before, and not all of them chose to fight to the death. When Elabonians and Trokmoi began leaping out of chariots and running to join the fight, a startling number of the raiders still on their feet threw down their axes and gave up.

"Where is great Voldar? Where is Lavtrig? Where is Smerts?" one of the prisoners said in fair Elabonian. "How can we beat you thralls without our gods? It is not fair."

Gerin found the Gradi's notion of fairness curious, but did not try to persuade him it needed changing. Instead, he allowed himself the luxury of a sigh of relief that the Gradi gods were still preoccupied, and the even greater luxury of hope that they would keep on being preoccupied.

After he'd pressed west from the keep on his earlier incursion into territory the Gradi held, the weather had gone bad on him. When he woke now to find the sun rising in a cloudless sky, he smiled and murmured, "Thank you, lord Baivers." Every day the god of barley and the underground powers bought for him was another day in which to strike the Gradi.

The wind did blow out of the west, but it was a natural wind, a warm wind. And, toward the end of the day, it brought a fresh scent with it, a tang he had known before but couldn't name at once. Duren noticed it, too, and asked, "What's that smell?" — for him, it was unfamiliar.

Van identified it before the Fox could. "That's the smell of the ocean, lad. We're closer to it now than back at Fox Keep, and no rain washing it out of the air before your nose can find it."

"You're right!" Gerin snapped his fingers in annoyance at himself. "When the wind swung round and blew out of the east, off the Greater Inner Sea, the air in the City of Elabon would smell like this."

"And when the wind didn't swing round, the air in the City of Elabon would smell like all the privies and stables in the world, same as it does in every other city," Van said.

"That's so," Gerin said. "When I lived there-back before you were born, Duren-I didn't notice the city stink, but by the gods I did when I first came into it. After a while, you get used to things."

Later that day, the army he led came upon a group of Gradi in a peasant village who behaved more in the manner the raiders had done before their gods made the acquaintance of Baivers and the subterranean powers. They went down to defeat, but the large majority of them fought until killed, and several of those who didn't also did not surrender, but broke away into the woods to the west.