Harry Turtledove - Fox and Empire

"I understand, lord king." Carlun hesitated, then said, "Forgive me, lord king, but in a lot of ways you think more like a serf than how I thought a noble would think. I always thought nobles had so much, they never needed to worry about what to do when things go wrong."

"Only goes to show you were born a serf and not a noble," Gerin answered. "The only people without worries are the dead ones and the ones who haven't been born yet. Nobles don't worry about their overlords' taking too much of the harvest away and making them starve, they worry about their neighbors' taking their lands away and killing them. Comes out about the same in the end, I'd say."

"Maybe so," Carlun said, "but nobles press on peasants all the time, and on their neighbors only now and again."

"Nobles in my domain had better not press on peasants all the time, or on their neighbors, either," Gerin said. But he understood what Carlun meant: that was how things commonly worked in the northlands, and how they had worked for generations. He wondered if he ought to despair when his own steward seemed to think the changes he was making were anomalies that wouldn't last.

He got no time to contemplate that gloomy notion, which might have been just as well: Herris Bigfoot, the headman of the peasant village close by Fox Keep, came running into the great hall, crying, "Lord king! Lord king! Come quick, lord king! Ferdulf's at it again."

"Hullo, Herris," said Carlun, who was the headman's brother-inlaw.

"Hullo." Herris grudged his kinsman by marriage the one word, but then gave his attention back to the Fox. "Will you come, lord king?"

Gerin had already risen to his feet. "I'm coming, Herris, though by all the gods I'm not certain what I can do to rein in Ferdulf that you couldn't manage for yourself."

"But, lord king, that's your job," Herris said.

The Fox sighed. It was his job, which didn't mean he relished it. How was he supposed to impose his will on a four-year-old demigod? Rather more to the point, how was he supposed to do it without regretting it afterwards? In weary resignation, he asked, "What's he gone and done this time?"

"Uh, lord king, you'd better come see for yourself," the headman answered.

People had been saying that about Ferdulf since the day he was born. He'd spoken to the midwife while she was cutting the cord that had linked him to his mother. He'd greeted Gerin when the Fox came down to the village to see what Mavrix had begotten on Fulda. And he'd only become more alarming since, as his power had grown with his body.

Out of Fox Keep and over the drawbridge strode Herris and Gerin. The village was only a short walk south of the keep. The peasants lived in thatch-roofed huts of wattle and daub. Smoke issued from the holes in the center of several of those roofs: women cooking, no doubt. Other women were working in the vegetable gardens by the huts or feeding the chickens that ran around as if they thought the place belonged to them, not to the Fox.

Most of the men were away from the village, either tending to cattle and sheep or weeding in the fields of growing wheat and barley. Gerin didn't notice any signs of unusual chaos, which wasn't always the case when Ferdulf got into mischief. He noticed as much, with something approaching hope in his voice.

"You'll find out, lord king," Herris Bigfoot said.

He led the Fox toward Fulda's hut. Before they got there, Fulda came outside. She might well have been the best-looking young woman in the village; the long tunic she wore lessened but could not hide the impact of her figure. Rihwin the Fox had chosen her at Gerin's urging, to help attract Mavrix to Fox Keep to fight the Gradi gods; after failing in that fight, Mavrix himself had chosen to impregnate her.

"Lord king," she said now, "I'm sure he didn't mean it."

When that phrase got stuck to the mischief of an ordinary small boy, it meant said mischief was worse than it had any business being. When it was applied to the mischief of a small demigod… "What's he gone and done now?" Gerin asked, not sure he wanted to find out. No, that wasn't true. He did want to find out. He wished he didn't have to find out.

"You'd better see for yourself," Herris and Fulda said in the same breath. They looked at each other and laughed. The headman's eyes lingered on Fulda. Any man's eyes had a way of lingering on Fulda. Seeing that, Gerin thought it was liable to cause trouble one of these days. It would, however, be trouble of an ordinary sort, trouble he'd seen many times before, trouble he knew how to handle. The kind of trouble Ferdulf caused was something else again.

"What's he gone and done?" the Fox repeated.

"He was playing in the mud by the pond, and he-" Fulda began. She gave up. Her shrug was magnificent.

"You'd better see for yourself," Herris said again.

Gerin loudly exhaled through his nose. Spinning on his heel, he stalked off toward the pond close by the village. Herris and Fulda hurried after him, both expostulating. None of the expostulations made much sense. That didn't surprise him; had things made sense to the villagers, they wouldn't have needed him to straighten them out.

He strode past the last hut. There was the pond: not much of a pond, perhaps, to a connoisseur of such, but enough. Ducks swam in it. In the mud by its edge, the village pigs wallowed. Their happy grunting filled the Fox's ears, much as the gabble from Herris and Fulda had done not long before. But not all of that grunting came from the edge of the pond, nor were all the quacks that punctuated it from ducks on the water.

After a second, more careful, look at the peaceful scene ahead, Gerin turned back to the village headman and the demigod's mother. "I owe you an apology," he said, not a common admission for a lord to make to a couple of serfs.

"What are we going to do, lord king?" Herris Bigfoot demanded.

"I-don't-know." Gerin stared out at the pond. Most of the ducks there were of the ordinary sort, the males with shiny green heads, the females drab and brown all over. A couple of them, though…

A couple of them, Gerin's eyes confirmed, were ducks only from the neck down. From the neck up, they were pigs. Because their heads were smaller than they had any natural business being, the grunts those heads admitted sounded strange, but they were undoubtedly piggy grunts.

And, sure enough, one of the piggy bodies by the pond sported an outsized green head with a flat bill, and another a head similar but brown. Neither pork nor fowl, the Fox thought dazedly.

"What are we going to do?" It seemed to be the sort of day where everyone repeated himself: Herris' turn again.

"I don't know." Gerin was echoing his own words, too. Then he found something new to add: "Hope they breed true, maybe."

Herris and Fulda both stared at him. He'd succeeded in startling them, anyhow. Well, they-and Ferdulf-had succeeded in startling him, too. Suddenly, the village headman started to laugh. "I wonder if they'll lay eggs or have live young," he said.

Fulda voiced a more immediately pragmatic consideration: "I wonder what they'd taste like."

Gerin tried to imagine a flavor halfway between duck and pork. His stomach rumbled; he didn't know whether his imagination was accurate, but it was vivid enough to make him hungry. He said, "If you find out what they taste like now, you won't find out later whether they lay eggs or not."

"You're right, lord king." Fulda didn't seem to have thought so far ahead.

But Herris Bigfoot said, "Lord king, what will you do to Ferdulf on account of this? Even if he is a god's son, he's got no business changing things around so. What if he starts putting the wrong heads on people next?"

"A lot of people are wrongheaded enough without getting switched around," Gerin said. But that was a quip, not an answer. Knowing it was necessary, the Fox went on, "I'll have a word with him." And what if he decides to put the wrong head on me? There was a thought the Fox wished he hadn't had. Pretending-most of all to himself-it had never crossed his mind, he turned to Fulda. "Is he back at your house?"