Fox and Empire

**

"Lord king, I beg you, put the army in motion soon," Carlun Vepin' s son said. "You have no idea how fast they're going through the stores you've built up over the years."

"I have a very good idea how fast they're doing it," Gerin returned. "I ought to. And the reason you build up stores in the first place, Carlun, is to be able to use them at times like these."

Normally, that sort of answer would have silenced the steward. Now, though, he shook his head and said, "Truly, lord king, you must see this for yourself. Come down into the storerooms under the castle. Look at the empty shelves. Look at the empty chambers, by the gods! See what this campaign is doing to Fox Keep."

The Fox sighed. The trouble with Carlun, as with any good steward, he supposed, was that accumulating got to be an end in itself for him, not a means to an end. Shouting at the former serf had produced no lasting relief. Humoring him might buy Gerin a longer quiet stretch. " All right, let's go have a look," he said, and rose from the bench in the great hall he and Carlun had been sharing.

After exclaiming in glad surprise, Carlun rose, too. Pausing in the kitchen only to light two clay lamps at a cookfire, the steward handed Gerin one of them and then led him down into the cellars below Castle Fox. The air was cool and damp down there, full of the yeasty smell of ale and a greener odor suggesting that, somewhere back among those corridors, a crock of gherkins had gone over.

Carlun pointed to a bare wall. "Look, lord king! We had jars of ale set there not so long ago."

"I know that," Gerin said patiently. "If we all started drinking river water, the first thing it would do is make all my vassals and all their vassals and all their retainers hopping mad at me. The second thing it would do is give about half of them a flux of the bowels. That's not really what you want if you expect to fight a war sometime soon."

"And here," Carlun said dramatically, paying no attention whatsoever to him. He held the lamp close to another row of jars, so the Fox could see they had the lids off and were empty. "These were full of wheat, and these over here were full of barley, and these-"

"And you, Carlun, you're full of beans." Gerin's patience was breaking now; when it broke, it left sharp edges. "If I don't feed my soldiers, that will get me talked about worse than not giving them ale."

The steward still was not listening. The steward was determined not to listen. In the darkness all around, the flickering lamplight gleamed off his pale, set face. Gerin had seen less battle-ready faces coming at him over shields. Carlun pointed toward a corridor down which they'd not yet gone. "And the peas, lord king! When you think what's happening to our peas…"

What Gerin was thinking was that this wasn't working as he'd hoped. No matter what he did, Carlun wasn't going to stop nagging him about how much the warriors were eating. Wearily, he said, "All right, show me the peas, Carlun, and then we'll go back upstairs. The men aren't eating any more than I thought they would, and the stores don't look to be in any worse shape than I thought they were."

Carlun rounded the corner. Gerin followed close behind him. With a gasp, the steward stopped in his tracks. Gerin had to stop in a hurry, too, lest he walk up Carlun's back and perhaps set the steward's tunic on fire. Then the Fox's hand flew to the hilt of his sword, for he heard two other gasps from farther up the corridor.

He took his hand away from his sword as fast as it had gone there. He started to laugh. Down here, two gasps didn't mean thieves. They meant two people surprised when they wanted privacy. He had fond memories of some of the corridors in the cellar, not this one in particular but some nearby. He knew his son Duren had amused himself down here, too.

"Sorry to disturb you," he called into the gloom at the end of the passage, wondering if he'd interrupted Dagref at a moment in his education he couldn't possibly have acquired from a book.

From out of that gloom came a deep voice: "You startled us, lord king. We didn't think anyone would be down here."

Gerin clapped a hand to his forehead. He knew that voice. It wasn' t Dagref's. "Carlun and I will go up to the great hall now," he said. "When the two of you have put yourselves back together, I want you to come up there, too. We have some talking to do, I'm afraid."

"Aye, lord king," came the answer from the darkness.

"Come on," Gerin said to Carlun, who was still staring down the passageway. "Let's go."

The steward looked back toward him as if he'd gone mad. "But, lord king, we're not nearly through the vegetables, and we haven't even begun on the smoked meats and, er, sausages."

"To the five hells with the vegetables and the smoked meats." Gerin didn't mention the sausages. If he didn't think about them, maybe he wouldn't think about… On the other hand, maybe he would. He grabbed Carlun by the arm. "Come on, curse you. Do you want to annoy them, hanging about down here?"

That got Carlun moving, as the Fox had thought it would. It got Carlun moving so fast, he tripped on the stairs going up to the kitchens not once but twice. Once up in the kitchens, he hurried out through them. Gerin followed more slowly. He wondered if Carlun would wait in the great hall to discuss beans and radishes and smoked pig's knuckles. When Carlun chose to find something else to do out in the courtyard, the Fox nodded without any particular surprise. He hadn't hired his steward to be a hero.

He sat down at the bench where he and Carlun had been talking. A couple of troopers started to come into the great hall. The Fox waved them out again. A serving girl walked over to him with a pitcher of ale. He waved her away, too, wanting both a clear head and no audience for the discussion he knew he was going to have.

A couple of minutes later, Geroge walked out of the kitchens, looking as nonchalant as he could. Gerin nodded and slapped the bench beside himself. Some of the monster's nonchalance evaporated as he came over and sat down.

Gerin nodded again. He didn't say anything, not until Tharma came out of the kitchens, too. She didn't even try for nonchalance. Worry twisted her face as she joined Geroge and the Fox. "Well, well," Gerin said, then, as mildly as he could. "How long has this been going on?"

Geroge and Tharma were too hairy for him to tell whether they blushed. By the way they wiggled on the benches, he thought they did. "Not long, lord king," Geroge answered. He did more talking than Tharma.

The Fox glanced over to the female monster. "You're not with child, are you?"

"Oh, no, lord king!" she said quickly. "I would know."

"That's good," he said, and wondered where to go from there. Geroge and Tharma had been raised as brother and sister. He thought they were brother and sister; the peasant who'd found them as cubs and brought them to him said they'd been together. But discussions of incest seemed out of place when they were the only two of their kind above ground in the northlands. He'd actually thought this moment would come sooner than it had.

"Are you angry at us, lord king?" Geroge asked. Reading his expression and tone of voice weren't easy, but he seemed more worried about the Fox's anger than one of his own children would have been. Gerin shook his head. If that wasn't irony, he didn't know what was.

With a sigh, he answered, "No, I'm not angry. You're the only two like yourselves in these parts, and you're… a man and a woman." He knew no better way to put it. "What else are you going to do?"

"Oh, good," Tharma said. "I hope I do get to be with child before too long."

Gerin coughed. "I'm not so sure that's a good idea," he said, one of the better understatements he remembered making in some time.

"Why not?" Tharma asked. "You could marry us the way you or the headman does for the serfs, and then the children wouldn't be bastards."

"We wouldn't want that, lord king," Geroge added seriously.

The Fox was tempted to pound his head against the top of the table at which he was sitting. All things considered, he was more proud of himself than not over how he'd raised them. They earnestly wanted to do everything the right way, the proper way. The only trouble was, they didn't see enough of the picture, a failing anything but unique to their kind.

He explained as gently as he could: "You know how people who don't know you get upset when they first see you, because you remind them of the trouble that happened around the time when you were born?" He couldn't come up with a politer way of putting that. The monsters had done their horrific best to overrun the northlands, and that best had nearly proved good enough.

"Oh, yes, we know about that," Geroge answered, nodding his large, fearsome head. "But once people get to know us, they see we're all right, even if we don't look just like them."

Part of the reason people saw that-a big part-was that the two monsters were under Gerin's protection. Another part, the Fox admitted to himself, was that, as monsters went-even as people went-Geroge and Tharma were good people. And another big part of the reason they got such tolerance as they did was that they were the only two monsters above ground.

"I don't know how happy regular people would be if you started raising a family," Gerin said carefully. "They might worry that the things that happened when you were born would start happening again."

"That's foolish!" Tharma bared her prominent teeth in indignation. "We know how to behave. We should. You taught us yourself. And we'd teach our little ones the same way."

"I'm sure you would." Gerin was absurdly touched at the faith they put in his teachings. No, his own children didn't pay nearly so much attention to them. "Even so, though, people would worry, and they might get nasty. I don't want that to happen."

"You're the king," Geroge said. "You could tell them to stop it, and they'd have to listen."

That was how the monsters had lived to grow up in the first place. Gerin didn't know if he could stretch it to a family of them. He didn' t really want to find out. He'd contemplated getting rid of Geroge and Tharma when they reached the age where they could reproduce their kind. He hadn't done it. The reason he hadn't done it, he now discovered, was that he couldn't do it. He'd raised them as his stepchildren, and they were in essence his stepchildren.

"By all the gods, be careful," he told them. He might have told Dagref the same thing. One of these days soon, he would be telling Dagref the same thing. He gestured sharply. Geroge and Tharma hastily rose from their seats and went out into the courtyard.

Gerin stared after them. He bunched his right hand into a fist and brought it down hard on the tabletop. He'd known this day was coming. He was a man who prided himself on acting with decision. Now the day had come and gone, and all he had to show for it was ambiguity.

He looked down at his fist and willed it to unfold. When it did, he started to laugh. It was not amusement, or not amusement with anything but the human condition: the part of it that had to do with the difference between the way men thought things would work and the way they actually turned out, and with making the best of that difference.

"Twenty years ago," he muttered under his breath, "twenty years ago, I thought I was going to slaughter every Trokm? on the face of the earth." He'd had good reason to think that, too. What better reason than the woodsrunners' killing his father and older brother and making him leave the City of Elabon to return to the northlands he'd learned to despise? He'd taken vengeance as great as any man could have done, and now…

And now Adiatunnus walked into the great hall, waved, walked over and sat down beside him, and clapped him on the back while shouting for ale. And the Fox was genuinely glad to have the Trokm? with him. He was too honest to try to pretend otherwise to himself.

"Life," he observed with a profound lack of originality, "is a much stranger and more complicated thing than we think when we first set out on it."

"Truth there," Adiatunnus agreed, "or would I be after calling a cursed southron like your own self a friend and meaning it?" That so closely mirrored Gerin's own thought, he blinked in startlement. Adiatunnus went on, "But not a chance at all have we of making the pups believe it. I've given up, I have. They think everything's simple, sure and they do. A grave, now, a grave's a simple thing. What comes before-nay."

"You should have gone down to the City of Elabon, to study philosophy," Gerin said. "You'd have made the Sithonian lecturers work for a living, I think."

"Philosophy? We're getting old, you and I. Is that philosophy?"

"It will do, till something better comes along." Gerin called for ale himself.