The Chernagor Pirates (10 page)

Before the interpreter could finish, the other Chernagor gasped. He flung his arms wide. “No!” he shouted—that was one word of the Chernagor speech Grus understood. He staggered and began to crumple, as though an arrow had hit him in the chest. “No!” he shouted again, this time blurrily. Blood ran from his mouth—and from his nose and from the corners of his eyes and from his ears, as well. After a moment, it began to drip from under his fingernails, too. He slumped to the ground, twitched two or three times, and lay still.

Grimly, Vsevolod said, “Now you see, Your Majesty. This is what my son, flesh of my life, now does to people.” He covered his face with his gnarled hands.

“Apparently, Your Majesty, this man did not escape Vasilko's vengeance after all.” The interpreter's dispassionate way of speaking clashed with Vsevolod's anguish.

“Apparently. Yes.” Grus took a gingerly step away from the Chernagor's corpse, which still leaked blood from every orifice. He took a deep breath and tried to force his stunned wits into action. “Fetch me Pterocles,” he told a young officer standing close by. He had to repeat himself. The officer was staring at the body in horrified fascination. Once Grus got his attention, he nodded jerkily and hurried away.

The wizard came quickly, but not quickly enough to suit Grus. Pterocles took one look at the dead Chernagor, then recoiled in dread and dismay. “Oh, by the gods!” he said harshly. “By the gods!”

Grus thought of Milvago, who was now the Banished One. He wished he hadn't. It only made Pterocles righter than he knew. “Do you recognize the spell that did this?” the king asked.

“Recognize it? No, Your Majesty.” Pterocles shook his head. “But if I ever saw the man who used it, I'd wash my eyes before I looked at anything else. Can't you feel how filthy it is?”

“I can see how filthy it is. Feel it? No. I'm blind that particular way.”

“Most of the time, I pity ordinary men because they can't see what I take for granted.” Pterocles looked at the Chernagor's corpse again, then recoiled. “Every once in a while, though, you're lucky. This, I fear, is one of
those
times.”

Bowing nervously before King Lanius, the peasant said, “If my baron ever finds out I've come before you, I'm in a lot of trouble, Your Majesty.”

“If the King of Avornis can't protect you, who can?” Lanius asked.

“You're here. I live along ways off from the capital. Wasn't that I had a cousin move here more than twenty years ago, give me a place to stay, I never would've come. But Baron Clamator, he's right there where I'm at.”

That probably—no, certainly—reflected reality. Lanius wished it didn't, but recognized that it did. “Well, go on …” he said.

Knowing the pause for what it was, the peasant said, “My name's Flammeus, Your Majesty.”

“Flammeus. Yes, of course.” Lanius was annoyed with himself. A steward had whispered it to him, and he'd gone and forgotten it. He didn't like forgetting anything. “Go on, then, Flammeus.” If he said it a few times, it
would
stick in his memory. “What's Baron Clamator doing?” He had a pretty good idea. Farmers usually brought one complaint in particular against their local nobility.

Sure enough, Flammeus said, “He's taking-land he's got no right to. He's buying some and using his retainers to take more. We're free men down there, and he's doing his best to turn us into thralls like the Menteshe have.”

He didn't know much about the thralls, or about the magic that robbed them of their essential humanity. He was just a farmer who, even after cleaning up and putting on his best clothes, still smelled of sweat and onions. He wanted to stay his own master. Lanius, who longed to be fully his own master, had trouble blaming him for that.

Grus had issued laws making it much harder for nobles to acquire land from ordinary farmers. He hadn't done it for the farmers' sake. He'd done it to make sure they went on paying taxes to Kings of Avornis and didn't become men who looked first to barons and counts and dukes and not to the crown. Lanius had seen how that helped him keep unruly nobles in line.

And what helped Grus could help any King of Avornis. “Baron Clamator will hear from me, Flammeus,” Lanius promised.

“He doesn't listen any too well,” the farmer warned.

“He'll listen to soldiers,” Lanius said.

“Ahh,” Flammeus said. “I figured King Grus would do that. I didn't know about you.” Courtiers stirred and murmured. Flammeus realized he had gone too far, and quickly added, “Meaning no disrespect, of course.”

“Of course,” Lanius said dryly. Some Kings of Avornis would have slit the farmer's tongue for a slip like that. Lanius' own father, King Mergus, probably would have. Even Grus might have. Lanius, though, had no taste for blood—Bubulcus, luckily for him, was living proof of that. “I
will
send soldiers,” the king told Flammeus.

The farmer bowed and made his escape from the throne room. He would have quite a tale to tell the cousin he was staying with. Lanius found new worries of his own. He'd never given orders to any soldiers except the royal bodyguards. Would the men obey him? Would they refer his orders to Grus, to make sure they were real orders after all? Or would they simply ignore him? Grus was the king with the power in Avornis, and everybody knew it.

Should I write to Grus myself? That might get rid of trouble before it starts,
Lanius thought. But it would also delay things at least two weeks. Lanius wanted to punish Clamator as quickly as he could, before the baron got word he was going to be punished.
I'll write Grus, telling him what I'm doing and why.
That pleased Lanius. It would work fine … unless the soldiers refused to obey him at all.

His heart pounded against his ribs when he summoned an officer from the barracks. He had to work hard to hold his voice steady as he said, “Captain Icterus, I am sending you and your troop of riders to the south to deal with Baron Clamator. He is laying hold of peasant land in a way King Grus' laws forbid.” He hoped that would help.

Maybe it did. Or maybe he'd worried over trifles. Captain Icterus didn't argue. He didn't say a word about referring the question to King Grus. He just bowed low, said, “Yes, Your Majesty,” and went off to do what Lanius had told him to do. His squadron rode out of the city of Avornis that very afternoon.

Yes, this is what it's like to be a
real
King,
Lanius thought happily. His sphere was no longer limited to the royal chambers, the archives, and the rooms where his moncats and monkeys lived. With Grus away from the capital, his reach stretched over the whole kingdom.

It did, at least, until he wrote to the other king to justify what he'd done. Writing the letter made him want to go wash afterwards. It wasn't merely the most abject thing he'd ever written. It was, far and away, the most abject thing he'd ever imagined. It had to be. He knew that. Grus would not take kindly to his behaving like a real king. But reading the words on parchment once he'd set them down … He couldn't stomach it. He sealed the letter without going through it a second time.

Sosia said, “I'm proud of you. You did what needed doing.”

“I think so,” Lanius said. “I'm glad you do, too. But what will your father think?”

“He can't stand nobles who take peasants under their own wing and away from Avornis,” his wife answered. “He won't complain about whatever you do to stop them. You're not about to overthrow him.”

“No, of course not,” Lanius said quickly. He would have denied it even if—especially if—it were true. But it wasn't. He didn't want to try to oust Grus. For one thing, his father-in-law was much too likely to win if they measured themselves against each other. And, for another, this little taste of ruling Lanius was getting convinced him that Grus was welcome to most of it. When it came to animals or to ancient manuscripts, Lanius was patience personified; the smallest details fascinated him. When it came to the day-to-day work of governing, he had to fight back yawns. He also knew he would never make a great, or even a good, general. Grus was welcome to all of that.

Sosia said, “I wish things were going better up in the Chernagor country. Then Father could come home.”

“I wish things were going better up in the Chernagor country, too,” Lanius said. “The only reason they aren't going so well is that the Banished One must be stronger up there than we thought.”

“That's not good,” Sosia said.

“No, it isn't.” Lanius said no more than that.

Sosia asked, “Can we do anything here to make things easier for Father up there? Would it be worth our while to start trouble with the Menteshe, to make the Banished One have to pay attention to two places at once?”

Lanius looked at her with admiration. She thought as though she were King of Avornis. He answered, “The only trouble I can see with that is, we'd have to pay attention to two places at once, too. Would it work a bigger hardship on the Banished One or on us? I don't know, not offhand. One more thing to go into a letter to your father.”

“One
more
thing?” Sosia cocked her head to one side. “What's Ortalis gone and done now?”

“I don't know that he's done anything since the last time,” Lanius said. They both made sour faces. Saying he didn't know that Ortalis had done anything new and dreadful wasn't the same as saying Sosia's brother hadn't done any such thing. How much had Ortalis done that nobody but he knew about?

Lanius shook his head. Whenever Ortalis did such things,
somebody
else knew about it. But how many of those
somebodies
weren't around anymore to tell their stories? Only Ortalis knew that.

“He should start hunting again,” Sosia said. Something must have changed on Lanius' face. Quickly, his wife added, “Hunting bear and boar and birds and deer and rabbits—things like that.”

“I suppose so.” Lanius wished he could sound more cheerful. For a while, Ortalis had seemed … almost civilized. Hunting and killing animals had let him satiate his lust for blood and hurt in a way no one much minded. If only it hadn't lost the power to satisfy him.

Sosia said, “I wish things were simpler.”

“Wish for the moon while you're at it,” Lanius said. “The older I get, the more complicated everything looks.” He was married to the daughter of the man who'd exiled his mother to the Maze. Not only that, he loved her. If that wasn't complicated enough for any ordinary use, what could be?

CHAPTER FIVE

King Grus looked from Hirundo to Pterocles to Vsevolod, then back again. They nodded, one after another. Grus' eyes went to the walls of Nishevatz. They frowned down at him, as they had ever since the Avornan army came before them. “We are agreed?” Grus said. “This is the only thing we have left to do?”

The general, the wizard, and the deposed Prince of Nishevatz all nodded again. Hirundo said, “If we didn't come to fight, why did we come?”

“I haven't got an answer for that,” Grus said.
But oh, how I wish I did!
Since he didn't, he also nodded, brusquely. “All right, then. We'll see what happens. Go to your places. I know you'll all do everything you can.”

Hirundo and Pterocles hurried away. Vsevolod's place was by Grus. “I thank you for this,” he said in his ponderous Avornan. “I will do, my folk will do, all things possible to do to help.”

“I know.” Grus turned away. He thought Vsevolod meant well, but still had other things on his mind. A trumpeter stood by, face tense and alert. Grus pointed to him. “Signal the attack.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” The trumpeter raised the horn to his lips. Martial music rang out. Only for a moment did it come from one trumpet alone. Then every horn player in the Avornan army blared forth the identical call.

Cheering Avornan soldiers swarmed forward. Grus wouldn't have cheered, not attacking a place like Nishevatz. Maybe the common soldiers didn't realize what they were up against. Some of them came within arrow range of that formidable wall and started shooting at the defenders on top of it, trying to make them keep their heads down. Others carried scaling ladders that they leaned up against the gray stone blocks. More Avornans—and some Chernagors, too—raced up the ladders toward the top of the wall.

“Come on!” Grus muttered, watching them through the clouds of dust the assault kicked up. “Come on, you mad bastards! You can do it! You
can
!”

He blinked. Beside him, King Vsevolod exclaimed in his own guttural language. Vsevolod grabbed Grus' arm, hard enough to hurt. The old man still had strength. “What is that?” he said. “I see ladders. Then I see no ladders.”

Pterocles was doing his job. “I hope Prince Vasilko's men don't see them, either,” Grus said. “If the men can get to the top of the wall, get down into Nishevatz …”

“Yes,” Vsevolod said. “Then to my son I have some things to say.” His big, gnarled hands opened and closed, opened and closed. Grus hadn't cared to be caught in that grip, and didn't think Vasilko would, either.

Even from so far away, the din was tremendous, deafening. Men shouted and screamed. Armor clattered. Dart-throwing engines bucked and snapped. Stones crashed down on soldiers storming up—the wizard's magic wasn't perfect. Ladders went over or broke, spilling soldiers off them.

And, much closer than the walls of Nishevatz, Pterocles suddenly howled like a wounded wolf. “Noooo!” he cried, his voice getting higher and shriller every instant. All at once, every siege ladder became fully visible again. The ladders started toppling one after another when that happened. Pterocles also toppled, still wailing.

Vsevolod said something in his own language that sounded incandescent. Grus said the foulest things he knew how to say in Avornan. None of their curses did any good. It quickly grew plain the assault on the wall wouldn't do any good, either.