Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

"The king!" Geroge shouted. The monster, still short a fang, held up a jack of ale in salute. "The king!"

One more feast , Gerin thought. One more big feast and I can send my vassals back to their own keeps and let them eat their own food . The fields past which he'd ridden on the way back to Fox Keep looked to have good crops coming in. He hoped they would; that would let him begin to rebuild his stores, which were painfully low. If his vassals had good harvests, too, they might even be able to send grain west to the lands across the Venien, which had had such a dose of Gradi-style weather that their fields were unlikely to yield much this year.

Then the Fox stopped worrying so much about the fields and the harvest. Dagref, Clotild, and Blestar came rushing out of the great hall and swarmed over him and Duren. "I want to hear everything that happened after you left," Dagref said. "I want you to tell it to me now, in order, so I don't get anything mixed up."

"I'm sure you want that," Gerin said, hugging his eldest by Selatre. He was also sure that, having heard everything once, Dagref would be able to correct him on details for years afterwards. And the boy would be right, too, almost every time: Dagref could be quite alarming. Gerin went on, "I'll tell you everything soon, maybe even tomorrow. Right now I want to-I need to-spend time with my vassals."

"It's not fair," Dagref protested. "You'll start to forget things."

"It'll be all right," Clotild told him. "Papa has a pretty good memory-most of the time," she added with a small sniff.

"Papa!" Blestar said happily. "Papa!" Gerin hugged him, too. He wasn't finding fault with his father: probably, though, for no better reason than that he was too young.

Selatre gave Gerin a jack of ale. He poured a small libation down onto the ground and said, "Thank you, lord Baivers." As with the battle cries there in the woods not far from the ocean, he had no idea whether the god of barley and brewing heard or was still too busy fighting the Gradi gods to pay any attention to mere mortals. He didn't care. He was grateful, and willing-no, eager-to show it.

He went through the keep-into the great hall, back out to the courtyard-several times, drinking, eating, clapping his vassals and their vassals on the back and telling them how splendidly they had fought, something which, in most cases, had the virtue of being true. They were doing much the same thing themselves, though less systematic in their mingling. He got called "lord king" often enough to begin to get used to the new title, even if he still wondered what Aragis the Archer would do in response to his wearing it.

Night fell. So many torches burned, people hardly seemed to notice. And then, here and there-on benches in the great hall, in quiet corners of the courtyard-the warriors who had returned to Fox Keep with him began falling asleep. Gerin remembered wishing he could sleep for three days after that fight in the woods. He was still far, far behind, and likely would be for… oh, the next twenty years, if he lived so long.

Not far away from him, Fand demanded of Van, "And how many wenches were you after sleeping with this time?" She sounded half-drunk and more than half-dangerous.

To Gerin's horror, Van, who had drunk a good deal himself, began counting on his fingers to make sure he got things right. "Seven, it was," he announced at last, as proud of his precision as Dagref might have been.

"It's an old man you're turning into," Fand told him. "You said a dozen the last time." Her voice rose to a screech: "Keep your breeches on, curse you!" She dashed her jack of ale into his face. Dripping and sputtering, he roared at her. She roared back, even louder.

Gerin's head started to ache. He looked around for his children. The younger ones, along with Van's son and daughter, were curled up on the rushes not far from the doorway to the great hall, but well away from the path people used to go in and out. Someone had spread a couple of wool blankets over them. They were fine where they were; he saw no point to waking them up and taking them to their bed. They might not fall asleep again for half the night.

He didn't see Duren at all. That probably meant his eldest was finding a way to celebrate his return that would have made his wife shout as Fand was shouting at Van. Since he didn't have a wife, though…

The Fox did see Selatre. With Dagref, Clotild, and Blestar conveniently asleep, he also saw an opportunity. He caught her eye, then glanced toward the stairway that led up to their bedchamber. She smiled and nodded.

With only the two of them in it, the bed seemed uncommonly large, uncommonly luxurious. Making love without having to hurry or to worry about the children waking up at an inconvenient moment seemed uncommonly luxurious, too.

Afterwards, Gerin thought of the pretty Trokm- girl who hadn't managed to tempt him into imitating Van. Chuckling, he told Selatre the story, then asked her, "What might it be like, to sleep with a king?"

"I," she said, "like it."

Geroge looked dubious as Gerin walked up to him carrying a small bowl filled with fine, moist clay. The monster's thin lips skinned back from his teeth. Those teeth looked so extremely formidable, Gerin wondered whether he wanted to go through with what he had planned.

He decided he did. "Open your mouth," he told the monster.

"You're going to have me eat clay?" Geroge protested. "You didn't tell me I'd have to eat clay."

"You don't have to eat it," Gerin told him. "You just have to let me press it up against your teeth so I can get the shape of the fang you have left. I'll use the mold you're giving me to make a gold tooth like it to put on the other side, to take the place of the one the gods under Ikos took."

"It'll taste horrible," Geroge said. "I don't think I want to do it."

"It's only dirt," Gerin said. "It's not even very dirty dirt, if you know what I mean: it's the fine clay they use for baking pots." When Geroge still shook his massive head, the Fox sighed and said, "When we're done, I'll give you a jack of ale to wash away whatever taste there is."

"Oh, all right." Geroge still sounded reluctant even after Gerin's promise, which showed how unwilling he had been before.

"Open your mouth," Gerin said again.

Eyes rolling, Gerin did. The Fox brought the lump of clay up to it with more than a little trepidation: if Geroge chose to bite down now, he'd spend the rest of his days one-handed. Geroge grunted as Gerin made the impression of his fang and the teeth near it. He went from grunt to growl, but held still.

"Splendid," Gerin said, gently freeing the clay. "If you'd wiggled there, I would have had to do this all over again." Oh, what a liar I'm getting to be , he thought. Doing it once had been hard. Doing it twice… He didn't care to contemplate doing it twice.

Geroge peered down with interest at the marks his teeth had made in the clay. "They're big, aren't they?" he remarked. "I didn't know they were that big. I thought they were more like yours."

"Did you?" Gerin said. That's what comes of living among humans all your life-we're your touchstone, your standard of comparison . That probably made Geroge and Tharma a lot safer to be near than they might have been otherwise.

He took the bowl with the impression to the oven the potter used in his trade and fired it, as the potter would have fired a platter or a storage jar. When it came out and had cooled, he took it to the shack where he worked his magic. He had no intention of doing anything magical to it, but had a small furnace of his own there. In it in another small bowl he put some armlets and rings from his treasury: loot taken from the Trokmoi. He stoked the little furnace and used goatskin bellows to make the fire burn hotter yet.