The Bastard King (3 page)

How long have I been out here?
he wondered, and shook his head. A steward came in with a silver carafe and cup on a golden tray. "Some wine, Your Majesty?"

"Yes!" Mergus exclaimed. The man poured the cup full and handed it to him. As he raised it to his lips, Certhia cried out again. Mergus' hand jumped. Some of the wine slopped out of the cup and onto the polished marble floor. The king cursed softly. He didn't want to show how worried he was. Rissa had said Certhia would bear a boy. She hadn't said that the baby would live - or that his concubine would.

The steward tried on a smile. "Call the spilled wine an offering, Your Majesty."

"I'd sooner call you an idiot," Mergus growled. "Get out - but leave that pitcher." The servant fled.

By the time the birthing-chamber door opened, the king was well on the way to getting drunk. He glowered at the midwife. "Well, Livia?"

"Very well, Your Majesty," she answered briskly. Her wrinkles and the soft, sagging flesh under her chin said she was almost as old as Mergus, but her hair, piled high in curls, defied time by remaining black, surely with the help of a bottle. "I congratulate you. You have a son. A little on the small side, a little on the scrawny side, but he'll do."

"A son," King Mergus breathed. He'd wanted to say those words ever since he became a man. When he was young, he'd never dreamt he would have to wait so long. When he got older and hope faded, as hope has a way of doing, he'd almost stopped dreaming he would be able to say them at all. That only made them sweeter now.

He looked into the carafe. It was empty. His cup was about half full. He thrust it at Livia. "Here. Drink."

She would not take it, but shook her head. Those piled curls never stirred. Tapping her foot impatiently, she said, "Won't you ask after your lady?"

"Oh." Mergus had never had to get used to feeling embarrassed, either. "How is she?"

"Well enough," the midwife said. She paused, tasting her words, and seemed to find them good, for she repeated them. "Yes, well enough. She did well, especially for a first birth. If the fever holds off" - her fingers twisted in a protective gesture - "she should do fine."

Mergus offered her the wine again. This time, she took it. He asked, "Can I see the boy - and Certhia?"

"Go ahead," Livia told him. "I don't know how glad she'll be to see you, but go ahead. Remember, she's been through a lot. No matter how well things go, it's never easy for a woman."

Mergus hardly heard her. He strode past her and into the birthing chamber. The room smelled of sweat and dung and, faintly, of blood - a smell not so far removed from that of the battlefield. Certhia had managed to prop herself up against the back of her couch. She held the newborn baby to her breast. The stab of jealousy Mergus felt at seeing the baby sucking there astonished him.

Certhia managed a wan smile that turned into a yawn. "Here he is, Your Majesty. Ten fingers, ten toes, a prick - a big prick, for such a little thing."

The king had already seen that for himself. It made him as absurdly proud as he'd been jealous a moment before. "Good," he said. "Give him to me, will you?"

Awkwardly, Certhia pulled the baby free. His face screwed up. He began to cry. His high, thin wail echoed from the walls of the birthing chamber. Certhia held him out to Mergus.

"A son," the king murmured. "At last, after all these years, a son." He held his newborn heir much more easily than Certhia had. He'd never had a son before, no, but he'd had plenty of practice with daughters. Putting the baby up on his shoulder, he patted it on the back.

"That's too hard. You'll hurt him," Certhia said.

"I know what I'm doing," Mergus told her. And he proved it - a moment later, the baby rewarded him with a surprisingly loud belch. The baby stopped crying then, as though he'd surprised himself.

"We'll call him - "

"Lanius," King Mergus broke in. He wanted to say the name before anyone else could, even his concubine. "Prince Lanius. King Lanius, when his time comes." The prince - the king to come - had, at the moment, an oddly shaped head much too big for his body, and an unfocused stare. Mergus' daughters had outgrown such things. He knew Lanius would, too.

Livia the midwife stuck her head into the chamber. "There's a priest here," she said.

"Good," Mergus said. "Tell him to come in." As the man in the green robe did, Certhia squeaked and tried to set her robe to rights. Ignoring that, King Mergus nodded to the priest. "Get with it, Hallow Perdix. I need a proper queen."

Captain Grus was drinking wine in a riverside tavern in the town of Cumanus when the news got to him. The fellow who brought it to the tavern stood in the doorway and bawled it out at the top of his lungs. The place - it was called the Nixie - had been noisy and friendly, with rivermen and merchants chattering; with a dice game in one corner; with about every other man trying to get one of the barmaids to go upstairs with him. But silence slammed down like a blow from a morningstar.

Nicator broke it. "He
married
her? He took a seventh wife? Go peddle it somewhere else, pal. Nobody'd do anything like that. It's against nature, is what it is."

All over the Nixie, heads solemnly bobbed up and down, Grus' among them. The very idea of a seventh wife was absurd. (His own wife, Estrilda, would have found the very idea of a second wife for him absurd - but that was a different story, and a different sort of story, too, since it had nothing to do with the gods - but if Olor had only six wives ...)

The news bringer held out both hands before him, palms up, as though taking an oath. "May the Banished One make me into a thrall if I lie," he said, and the silence he got this time was of a different sort. Nobody, especially here on the border, would say such a thing lightly. Into that silence, he went on, "He
did
marry her, I tell you. Said he wanted to make sure his heir - Lanius, the brat's name is - wasn't a bastard. Hallow Perdix said the words over him and his concubine - I mean, over Queen Certhia."

"How'd he find a priest who'd say such filthy words?" somebody asked belligerently.

"How? I'll tell you how," answered the man in the doorway. "The priest who married them was Hallow Perdix. Now he's High Hallow Perdix. He was no fool, not him. He knew which side his bread was buttered on."

"That's terrible!" two or three people said at once. Whether it was terrible or not, Grus was convinced it was true. The man with the news had too many details at his fingertips for it to be something he was making up.

"What does the arch-hallow have to say about the whole business?" he asked.

"Good question!" the news bringer said. "Nobody knows the answer yet, I don't think. If he says Prince Lanius is a bastard, he's a bastard, all right, and he isn't a prince, not anymore."

"If he says that, I know what King Mergus says:'Out!'" Nicator jerked a thumb at the door, as though dismissing a rowdy drunk.

"
Can
the king sack the arch-hallow?" Grus asked.

"
I
don't know," Nicator said.
"Can
the arch-hallow tell the king the son he's waited for his whole life long is nothing but a little bastard who'll never, ever, plop his backside down on the Diamond Throne?"

That was another good question. Grus had no idea what soft of answer it had. He was sure of one thing, though - Avornis would find out. No, he was suddenly sure of two things. He wished he weren't, and gulped his wine cup dry to try to chase the second thing from his head.

No such luck. Nicator knew that had to mean something, and asked, "What is it, Skipper?"

"I'll tell you what," Grus answered. "I can almost hear the Banished One laughing from here, that's what." He held up his cup to show the nearest barmaid it was empty, then proceeded to get very drunk.

* * *

King Mergus strode through the royal palace in the city of Avornis in the center of a bubble of silence. Whenever servants or courtiers or soldiers saw him coming, they jerked apart from one another, bowed with all the respect they were supposed to show, and stayed frozen as statues till he'd passed. Then they started up again, talking behind his back.

He'd tried catching them at it a couple of times. He could, but the sport soon palled. They didn't even have the grace to look embarrassed.

The real trouble began a few days after Hallow Perdix made the king's concubine queen. Mergus came up a corridor at the same instant that his brother, Prince Scolopax, started down it from the other end.

They both stopped for half a heartbeat when they saw each other, and then both kept walking. Mergus braced himself, as though heading into battle - and so he was.

For close to thirty years, Mergus had ruled Avornis. For close to thirty years, his younger brother had been a spare wheel - and a mistrusted spare wheel, at that. With nothing useful to do, Scolopax had thrown himself into drink and dissipation. These days, he looked ten years older than the king.

With a grim nod, Mergus started to walk past Scolopax. "You bastard," his brother said, breathing wine fumes into his face. "You and your bastard."

A couple of servants had been walking along the passageway, too. They froze and turned back toward the king and his brother, staring as they might have stared after the first warning rumble of an avalanche. King Mergus hardly noticed them. If his look could have killed, Scolopax would have lain dead on the floor. "Call me what you choose - " Mergus began.

Prince Scolopax glared back with loathing all the greater for being, unlike Mergus, impotent. "If I did, your bones would catch fire inside your stinking carcass."

Mergus went on as though his brother hadn't spoken: " - but Lanius is my legitimate son and heir, being the child of my lawfully wedded wife."

Scolopax's scornful snort sounded as though he were breaking wind. "Throw seven and you'll win at dice. At marriage?"

He made that rude, rude noise again. "How much did you pay Perdix the pimp, besides promotion?"

"He won promotion on his merits, and I paid him not a copper halfpenny." Mergus lied without hesitation.

Scolopax's laugh was more a howl of pain. He shook a long, bony finger under the king's nose. "All right. All right, gods curse you. Olor has six, but you think you're entitled to more. But I tell you this, my
dear
brother." A viper could have given the word no more venom. Shaking his finger again, Scolopax went on, "I tell you this: Whether you have that bastard or not, I know who's going to rule Avornis when you're stinking in your grave. Me, that's who!" He jabbed his thumb at his own chest.

"Do you hear that sound?" King Mergus cupped a hand behind his ear. Scolopax frowned. But for their two angry voices, the corridor was silent. Mergus answered his own question anyhow. "That's the Banished One, licking his chops."

The prince went death pale. "You dare," he whispered. "You dare, when the Banished One whispered in your ear, telling you to wed your whore in spite of all that's right and prop - "

He ducked then, just in time. Mergus' right fist whistled past his ear. But Mergus' left caught him in the belly and doubled him up. Scolopax hit the king in the face. The two old men - the two brothers - stood toe to toe, hammering away at each other with every bit of strength that was in them.

Their quarrel had drawn more servants to the corridor. "Your Majesty!" cried some of those men, while others said, "Your Highness!" They all rushed toward the king and the prince and got between them so they couldn't reach each other anymore.

"I'll have your head for this!" Mergus shouted at Scolopax.

"It's better than the one you've got now!" Scolopax shouted back.

And Mergus knew his threat was idle, empty. However much he wanted to be rid of his brother forever, he knew he couldn't kill him, not unless Scolopax did something far worse than giving him a black eye (he'd bloodied his brother's nose, he saw with no small satisfaction). He didn't have many years left himself. With Scolopax gone and his son a child, who would rule Avornis after him? A regency council - and the only thing Mergus feared more was the Banished One in all his awful majesty.

If there was a better recipe for paralyzing the kingdom than a squabbling regency council, no one had found it yet.

Scolopax dabbed blood from his upper lip with a silken kerchief. "You maniac," he panted. "If you had the Scepter of Mercy, you'd bash people's brains in with it."

"If I had the Scepter of Mercy - " Mergus stood there panting, trying to get enough air. He scowled at Scolopax, feeling all the bruises his brother had given him. He tried again. "If I had it - " That was no good, either; he had to stop for a second time. "Get out of my sight," he said thickly, rage almost choking him.

He was closer to taking his brother's head for that remark than for all the bruises he'd had from the prince. And Scolopax had to know as much, too. He shook himself free of servants and courtiers and left Mergus without another word.

"Your Majesty - " one of the servants began.

"Go away," Mergus said. "Leave me." One advantage of being king was that, when he said such things, people obeyed him. The corridor emptied as though by magic.

But that proved less helpful than Mergus had hoped. It left him alone with his thoughts - and with his brother's final mocking words.

If I had the Scepter of Mercy...
His shoulders slumped. He sighed. No King of Avornis had looked on, let alone held, the great talisman for four hundred years. It had been on procession in the south, to hearten the people against the Banished One and against the fierce Menteshe who did his bidding (and who, then, were newly come to the borders of Avornis), when a band of nomads, riding faster than the wind, swooped down on its guardsmen and raped it away. These days, it stayed in Yozgat, the capital of the strongest Menteshe principality.

The Banished One couldn't do anything with the Scepter. If he could have, he surely would have by now. And if ever the Banished One found the power to wield it, he wouldn't merely storm the city of Avornis. He would storm back into the heavens themselves. So the priests said, and King Mergus knew no reason to disbelieve them.