close to that.'
'As best I could see, it was meaningless, not difficult,' Dagref said.
'But can you see as far as the farseeing god?' Gerin asked.
Dagref only shrugged. Adiatunnus said, 'I'm with the colt, lord king. When you hear summat without plain sense in it, more often the reason is that it's senseless than too clever for words, I'm thinking.'
More often than not, Gerin would have made the same argument. Here, he said, 'I've seen Biton be right a good many times when everyone would have thought he was wrong. I'm not going to say he's wrong here, not now.'
'Why do we hope we don't find a god?' Van demanded. 'If we're seeking one, shouldn't we hope we do find him?'
'And which god would you be seeking?' Adiatunnus added. ' ' Twouldn't be Biton his own self, or we're ruined or ever we start. But he wouldna say who it was, did you see?'
'Obscure. Ferdulf had the right word for it,' Gerin said. 'Sooner or later, we will have the meaning laid out before us.'
'Aye, likely when it's too late to do us any good,' Van said.
'That is the way of oracles sometimes,' the Fox agreed. 'But you never know till you try.'
'And now that we have gone and tried and got nothing to speak of for it, what are we to be doing next?' Adiatunnus asked. 'Shall we bring our army through the valley of Ikos?-on the promise we willna linger, mind.'
'I don't want to do that,' Gerin said. 'I don't think the god wants us to do that. If it's that or stay out and be destroyed, then I might, but not before. I still have a fighting chance of beating the imperials, and no one who opposes a god straight up will do anything but lose.'
'You say that,' Dagref said, 'you who have probably outdone more gods in more different ways than anyone else alive.'
'But never straight up,' Gerin said. 'The way to deal with gods is to trick them, or else to make them do what you want by showing them it gives them some advantage, too, even if that's just that it lets them score off a rival; or else to use a rival either to beat the god who's angry at you or to distract the other god so he doesn't care about you any more.'
'That's what you did with the Gradi gods,' Dagref said, and Gerin nodded.
'So it is,' he answered. 'The brawl I got them into has worked out better-which is to say, it's lasted longer- than I ever dared hope.'
'Puts me in mind of something that happened to me a good many years ago, back in my wandering days,' Van said as they waited for the attendants to bring back their chariots.
'Probably something that didn't happen,' Ferdulf said, 'if it's anything like most of your stories.'
Van glared at him. 'I ought to pop you like the blown-up pig's bladder you are,' he growled.
Ferdulf rose into the air. 'I am the son of a god, and you would be wise to remember it, lest we discover who pops whom.' He was not much more than half as tall as the outlander, and couldn't possibly have weighed a quarter as much, but that little body held power of a different sort from Van's brute strength.
Glaring still, Van said, 'I don't care whose son you are, you bigmouthed little weed-I'd like to see you show that even one of my stories, even one, mind you, has the smallest bit of falsehood in it.'
Ferdulf fell a few inches, a sign of dismay or chagrin. 'How am I supposed to show that?' he demanded. 'I wasn't born yet when you were having these adventures you tell lies about, and I haven't been to the preposterous places where you had them.'
'Then why don't you shut up?' Van asked sweetly. 'Why don't you shut up before you open your mouth so wide, you fall right in?'
Now Ferdulf glared. Before he could say anything, Adiatunnus said, 'I'm fain to hear the outlander's tale. He's never dull, say what else you will of him.' His comrades nodded; Van's stories had long been popular along the border.
'Shall I go on, then?' Van asked. When even Ferdulf did not say no, go on he did: 'This was out in the Weshapar country, east of Kizzuwatna and north of Mabalal. The Weshapar have the most jealous god in the world. He's so crazy, he won't even let them call him by his name, and he has the nerve to claim he's the only real god in the whole wide world.'
'Foosh, what a fool of a god he is,' Adiatunnus than. 'What does he think of the gods of the folk who are lucky enough not to be after worshiping him?'
'He thinks they aren't real at all-that the people around the Weshapar country are imagining them,' Van answered.
'Well! I like that!' Ferdulf said indignantly. 'I'd like to fly over his temple and piss on it from on high. Maybe he would think that was his imagination, too. Or else I could-'
'Do you want to say what you would do, or do you want to hear what this god and I did do?' Van gave Mavrix's son a dirty look. The attendants fetched the chariots then; everyone but Ferdulf got into them. He floated along beside the one Dagref drove.
'Oh, go on.' Now Ferdulf sounded very much like his father, which is to say, petulant.
'Thank you, most gracious demigod.' From living with Gerin, Van had learned to be sardonic when it suited him. It didn't suit him very often, which made him more dangerous when it did. While Ferdulf sputtered and fumed, the outlander went on, 'This god of the Weshapar put me in mind of a jealous husband. He was always sneaking around keeping an eye on his people to make sure they didn't worship anyone but him, and-'
'Wait,' Dagref said. 'If this strange god said none of the other gods around him was real, how could people worship them? They wouldn't be worshiping anything at all. Logic.'
'I don't think this god ever heard of logic, and I'm starting to wish I'd never heard of you,' Van said. 'Between you and Ferdulf, we' ll be all the way back with the rest of the army before I'm through. Anyhow, there I was, on the way through the Weshapar country-it's hills and rocks and valleys, hot in the summer and cold as all get-out in the winter-trading this for that, doing a little fighting on the side to help keep myself in food and trinkets, when one of the Weshapar chieftains got on the wrong side of this god.'
'How'd he do that?' Gerin asked.
'To the five hells with me if I know,' Van answered. 'A god like that, any little thing will do the trick, same as a jealous husband will think his wife is sleeping with somebody else if she sets foot outside the front door.' He sighed. Maybe he was thinking of Fand, though he wasn't a jealous husband of the type he'd described-and though he gave her plenty of reason for jealousy, too. Gathering himself, he went on, 'Like I say, I don't know what Zalmunna-this Weshapar chief I was talking about-did to get his god angry at him, but he did something, because the god told him he had to cut the throat of his son to make things right-and to show he really did reverence that foolish god.'
'And did this Zalmunna spalpeen tell him where to head in?' Adiatunnus asked. 'I would ha' done no other thing but that.'
'But you and your people hadn't been worshiping this god for who knows how many generations,' Van said. 'Zalmunna was in a state, I'll tell you. He was in an even worse state because his son was all ready to let himself be used like a goat or a hog, too. If the god wanted him, he was ready for it. Ready?-no, he was eager as a bridegroom wedding the loveliest wench in the countryside.'
'You would think he would have had better sense,' Dagref said.
'No, lad-you would think he had better sense, because you have better sense yourself,' Van said. 'What you haven't figured out yet is how many people are fools, one way or another. What you haven't figured out is how many people are fools one way and another.'
'I wonder why they are,' Dagref said, a question aimed not so much at Van as at the world around him.
The world around him did not answer. Van went on, 'Like I say, the lad was ready to be offered up like a beast. Most of the Weshapar were ready for him to be offered up, too. They were used to doing what their god told them. He was their god. How could they do anything else? Even Zalmunna was thinking he might have to do it. He didn't want to, you understand, but he didn't see that he had much choice.
'We got to talking the night before he was supposed to go into this overgrown valley where that god had his shrine and kill the boy. He'd got himself drunk, the same way you would have if this was happening to you. He knew what I thought of his god, which was not much, so he came to me instead of to any of the rest of the
