Fox and Empire

**

After a few days, scouts brought back word that the imperials looked to be getting ready to push forward again. Gerin clicked his tongue between his teeth, far from a happy sound. "I knew it was coming," he said with a sigh. "I'd have been happier if it hadn't come so soon, though."

"What will we do, lord king?" a scout asked.

"Fight, I suppose." Gerin sighed again. "The only other choice we have is letting ourselves get pushed back into the valley of Ikos, and I don't want to do that. With everything else that's gone wrong in this campaign, I don't need to have Biton angry at me, too."

"We lost the last time we tried to withstand the imperials," Dagref pointed out. "Why should this time be any different?"

"Last time, they picked the ground-or they didn't leave me much choice, which amounts to the same thing," the Fox answered. "They struck faster and harder than I thought they would. We have better warning this time. I'm going to fight where I want to fight, by the gods."

"What sort of ground are you thinking of?" Dagref asked.

"I have a place in mind, as a matter of fact," Gerin said. "It's a long, thin stretch of meadow, with really heavy woods on either side. Off to the left, beyond the woods, there's a little hill I intend to screen off with a good many of Rihwin's riders. Do you see what's in my mind?"

"I think so," Dagref answered. "You want to put men back there and trap the imperials between your two forces, don't you?"

"That's what I'm planning, yes," Gerin agreed. "Now I have to hope the imperials don't see it as clearly as you've done."

But the imperials, to his loud, vehement, and profane dismay, did see the trap, and refused to fall into it. When his riders picked off one of the scouts from south of the High Kirs, he found out why. "We' ve got Swerilas in command of us now," the prisoner said. "Swerilas the Slippery, men call him. He sent Arpulo Werekas' son back west to take charge of the sieges against Gerin-"

"I'm Gerin," Gerin said.

"Against Aragis, then. I can't keep you rebels straight," the captured imperial said. "Swerilas figured that was the easier part of the job, so he gave it to Arpulo. You've caused Arpulo trouble; Swerilas decided he needed to deal with you himself."

"Were it not for the honor he shows me, it's a compliment I could do without," Gerin murmured, and then, "Swerilas the Slippery, eh? He' d be the fellow who was in charge of your second army, wouldn't he?"

"Aye," the prisoner said. "Arpulo led the first."

Gerin scowled. His life had just got more difficult. He had Arpulo's measure, even if he'd lacked the manpower to beat him in their latest clash. But Swerilas… an ekename like the Slippery was all too close to the Fox, and Swerilas had shown that he had more than a few ideas of his own. Gerin would have been happier fighting a bruiser who didn't think very well.

After he sent the prisoner away, he decided he might have been lucky that Swerilas had stayed out of his trap rather than letting himself go in with his eyes open and then smashing out in both directions at once. Gerin's force was inferior to his in numbers. Against an average commander like Arpulo, the Fox had no qualms-well, few qualms-about dividing even an inferior force. Against someone who knew what he was doing, as Swerilas plainly did, dividing his force was asking to be destroyed in detail.

With another scowl, Gerin did his best to come up with a new plan. Against Swerilas, he had fewer options than he'd had against Arpulo. And Swerilas, no doubt, would be able to think of more unpleasant things to do to him than would have crossed Arpulo's fierce but unimaginative mind.

Gerin dispatched all his horsemen to harass Swerilas' scouts, to drive them back on the main body of imperials, and to disrupt the imperials' foraging as much as he could. "You riders are the one force we have that the imperials don't know everything about," he told Rihwin the Fox. "We'll wring every particle of advantage we can out of that."

"Aye, lord king," Rihwin said. "We shall fall on the men of the Elabonian Empire like a whirlwind. We shall trouble them with continuous attacks from all directions, until they weepingly regret ever having stirred north of the High Kirs."

That was as grandiloquent as anything Gerin had heard lately, even from Rihwin. But Rihwin, fortunately, was almost as long on fighting talent as he was on bombast. Gerin thumped him on the shoulder. "Aye, that's good. That's what I want from you. The harder he has to work against your horsemen, the less leisure he'll have to do anything against the main army here."

"I shall think on this with gratitude as the imperials chew my force to pieces," Rihwin replied, bowing.

"Go howl," Gerin said. "I don't want you to get chewed to pieces. I'm counting on you not to let yourself and your force get chewed to pieces. By the gods, I don't want to fight a pitched battle with this Swerilas. I want you to keep him running every which way, so he's too busy and hot and bothered to come and fight a pitched battle with the whole army."

"Oh, I understand you, lord king," Rihwin said. "Whether what you want and what Swerilas wants are one and the same remains to be seen."

"That's true in any fight," Gerin said. "I'll move forward as far as I can with the bulk of my force. If you do get in trouble, I'll support you as best I can." He set a hand on Rihwin's shoulder again. "Do your best not to get in too much trouble, would you?"

"How can you say such a thing about me?" Rihwin drew back in an artful display of indignation. "Have I ever been anything in all my days save staid and sedate?" He had an excellent straight face.

"No, never," Gerin agreed soberly. Both men laughed then.

Rihwin said, "Will you let Ferdulf come along with me? It will be easier to annoy the imperials if I have the best notion I can of where they are, where they're moving, and what they want to try to do to me."

"If you can talk Ferdulf into going with you, you're welcome to him," Gerin answered. His grin was distinctly sardonic. "In fact, you' re welcome to him as a general principle."

"As a general principle, I don't want him, thanks." Rihwin's grin closely matched Gerin's. "Didn't you hear us going at each other a few days ago?"

"Most of the northlands heard you, I should think," Gerin said.

"I daresay. You can understand me, then. As a flying spy, though, he has his uses."

"Whether he'll want anything to do with you, of course, remains to be seen," Gerin said. "He's liable not to be very happy with you, you know, after the rough handling Mavrix gave him-you were the one who was bound and determined to summon the Sithonian god."

"Yes, that's what Ferdulf was screeching about before," Rihwin said, "but I'll take my chances now."

"You certainly will," Gerin agreed, at which Rihwin gave him a dirty look. Gerin went on, "Talk with him, though. If, after he's done insulting you some more, he decides to go along, I think you're righthe'll be quite useful to you as a flying spy."

"After something close to half a lifetime with you and Van of the Strong Arm, I shan't let insults from a bad-tempered baby demigod faze me," Rihwin said. Off he went, ostentatiously ignoring the sour stare Gerin sent after him.

Sure enough, he managed to persuade Ferdulf to accompany the force of riders. After the shouting Ferdulf put up when he made the request, though, Gerin wouldn't have blamed Rihwin if he'd buried Mavrix's son upside down in the ground. That, at least, would have made Ferdulf shut up.

Watching the little demigod wheel and swoop above the horsemen, Gerin was also just as well pleased not to be under there, in the same way he would have been just as well pleased not to be under a flock of crows with griping bowels. The crows would have let fly-or let fall-at random. Ferdulf, if the evil mood took him, could aim.

Van was not watching Ferdulf as the riders trotted away. He was trying to spot Maeva among the warriors on horseback, and not having much luck. Turning to Gerin, he said, "I still wish you'd made her go home."

"She's doing what she wants to do, you know," the Fox answered. " You couldn't stop it more than another couple of years at the most."

"That would be good," Van said. "In a couple of years, likely enough, we wouldn't be worrying about the imperials any more."

"Unless we'd already lost to them, of course," Gerin replied. "No, wait-I take your point. But we would be worrying about Aragis or the Trokmoi or the Gradi or somebody, by the gods. If Maeva wanted to fight somebody, she'd find somebody to fight. And if you didn't feel like letting her, she'd fight you."

"Maybe. Maybe." The prospect didn't make Van look any happier. " But that's not the only thing I fret about. Come on, Fox-you know what soldiers are like."

"Well, what if I do?" the Fox said. "Anyone who tried to take anything she didn't feel like giving would regret it as long as he lived, and that might not be long, either. We've been over this ground before, you know."

"Oh, aye." The outlander let out a long, sad sigh. "Why couldn't she have just stayed home and come to notice Dagref, say? We could have married them off, and that would have been an end to it."

Gerin didn't gape like a fool. He didn't burst into hysterical laughter. He didn't even suffer a coughing fit. The effort he needed to keep from doing any of those things would have let him lift the temple at Ikos over his head and throw it from one end of the valley to the other.

In an offhand tone that somehow wasn't more elaborately casual than it should have been, he answered, "If they like the idea, you wouldn't see me complaining. We'll have to see if we can make it seem as if they're the ones who came up with it, not us."

"Truth that," Van said, one of the turns of phrase he'd learned from the Trokmoi that still occasionally showed up in his speech. "If anybody older than I was came up with a notion back when I was a sprat, I didn't want anything to do with it." He cocked his head to one side and studied the Fox. "And you! You must have been a terror when it came to listening to your elders."

"Who, me?" Gerin did his best to look like innocence personified. His best, evidently, wasn't good enough, for Van guffawed.

"Aye, you, Captain," he said. "Go on and look sweet all you fancy. My guess is, you weren't any more ready to pay the least bit of attention to what your father told you than Dagref is for you."

"My father hit me harder and more often than I've hit Dagref," Gerin said after a brief pause for thought. "That made me more likely to listen, but I think less likely to agree."

Van smacked a fist into the palm of his other hand. "Sometimes you'll settle for getting them to listen that way."

"You say that now," Gerin said. "What did you say then?"

"Ahh, what difference does that make?" the outlander replied with a grin. "I was just a brat then, wet behind the ears. Of course, I wouldn't have believed that if anybody told it to me, mind you."

Rihwin began sending back prisoners and the occasional wagon pilfered from the imperials and news of what Swerilas the Slippery was up to. "The Empire's general looks to be pulling all his men back into a knot," one of Rihwin's riders reported, "the same way a snail will go back into its shell if you poke it in one of its little horns." He held up a couple of fingers, imitating a snail.

"The creatures have their eyes at the ends of those stalks," Gerin said, a fact he'd picked up in the City of Elabon. He'd never had occasion to trot it out in all the many years since, but his fiendishly tenacious memory hadn't let him forget it.

Now that he finally did get to use it, he discovered the horseman didn't believe him. With a laugh, the fellow said, "That's funny, lord king."

"I mean it," Gerin said indignantly. "If those little black dots on the ends of the stalks aren't eyes, where would a snail keep 'em?"

"How am I supposed to answer a question like that?" the rider said. "The whole world knows snails have no eyes."

"But they do," the Fox insisted. He couldn't persuade the horseman he wasn't joking. Finally, in disgust, he sent him back to Rihwin. Gerin was still fuming when he turned to Van, who had listened to the last part of his exchange with the scout. "Can you believe the stubborn ignorance of that man?"

Van chuckled. He shook his head, but not in the way Gerin would have wanted. "Oh no you don't, Captain," the outlander said. "You can try and confuse a rider from some backwoods keep as much as you like, but you're not going to do it to me, by the gods. When you come right down to it, that fellow was right-everybody knows snails don't have any eyes."

Gerin snarled a curse and stalked off.

He snarled another curse a couple of days later, when the imperials mauled a detachment of Rihwin's riders. The damage done was bad enough that Rihwin felt he had to come back himself to explain. " They outwitted me," he said, sounding angry and embarrassed at the same time. "They had a small band showing, making their way through wheatfields. But more of them were lurking in the trees. As soon as we were well engaged with the decoys, out they swarmed."

"That's… unfortunate," Gerin said. He looked down his nose at Rihwin. "It's also unfortunate that you let yourself be fooled by the sort of trick we've used so often ourselves."

"I didn't expect it of the imperials," Rihwin said, a little sullenly. "One of the reasons I came north of the High Kirs all those years ago, if you'll remember, is because interesting things happen here while all stays stodgy south of the mountains. The way the Emperor's men fought in this campaign had given me little reason to change my view."

"Except for the forces commanded by this Swerilas the Slippery," Gerin said. "He beat us when we were almost down to Cassat, and he did it the same way he did here: he stuck out one force, and then he struck with another one we didn't expect. If bait looks too juicy to be true, my fellow Fox, it likely is."

"But it didn't look too juicy to be true." Rihwin angrily kicked at the dirt. "By the gods, you would have sent in the riders with no more hesitation than I showed. It was a chance encounter, nothing more."

"No, it seemed a chance encounter-or you wouldn't have been ambushed," Gerin said. "He must have set it up by gauging where your detachment was, which way they were headed, and how fast." He kicked at the dirt, too. "Which means Swerilas is very slippery indeed."

"I want another crack at him," Rihwin said. "No one does that to me, not without paying for it."

"Unfortunately, someone did do it to you," Gerin answered, "and I don't want you charging after the imperials all wild for revenge. Swerilas will be waiting for something like that."

For a wonder, he got through to Rihwin. "Aye, belike you're right," Rihwin said. "It's just what a man from the City of Elabon would expect in the northlands-let the locals make fools of themselves, and then count on them to make bigger fools of themselves trying to recover."

"Of course, odds are he didn't know he was facing another man from south of the High Kirs," Gerin said.

"Go ahead-rub salt in the throbbing wound." Rihwin struck a pose of affronted dignity. Then it collapsed, and he chuckled. "Speaking of men from south of the High Kirs, lord king, did I tell you we've captured my cousin?"

"No." Gerin raised an eyebrow. "How did that happen?"

"Usual sort of way," Rihwin answered. "He got wounded in the shoulder-doesn't look too bad-fell out of his chariot, and we scooped him up. When I found out his name was Ulfilas Batwin's son, I asked about his family, because my uncle's son Batwin is a man of about my age. And sure enough, we are first cousins, once removed."

"You've been removed by twenty years and a mountain range, too," Gerin said. He sighed and put an arm around Rihwin. "All right. You walked into this one. It's over. Don't do it again." He laughed. "I sound as if I'm talking to one of my sons, don't I? One of these days, maybe, just maybe, you'll grow up. One of them has done it, and the second is on the way."

"I resent the imputation." Rihwin looked affronted again.

"Go ahead," Gerin said cheerfully. "I'll probably have to keep right on lecturing you till they shovel dirt over one of us or the other."

"You could shut up instead," Rihwin suggested. They laughed, both knowing that Gerin shutting up was about as likely-or rather, as unlikely-as Rihwin growing up.