The Scepter's Return (40 page)

She might have been a constable keeping track of a sneak thief's habits. Lanius thought that was unfair. He never took anything that wasn't freely given. Whether he took something Sosia didn't want him to have was a different question, one he didn't care to examine so closely.

He did ride out to the country a few days later. While he was interested in what Pouncer had learned, riding out to see the moncat was not his idea of fun. Some people enjoyed horseback riding for its own sake. Lanius found that almost as strange—and almost as perverse—as Limosa's taste for the lash. He'd become a good enough rider to stay in the saddle if his horse didn't get too frisky, and he rode placid geldings to try to make sure that didn't happen. He could do it, but he did it without enjoyment.

There was something he had in common with Grus. The other king wasn't a natural equestrian, either; Hirundo, who was, never tired of teasing him. But Grus did well enough not merely to ride but to fight on horseback. Grus might not—did not, in fact—have a lot of education, but he'd proved competent in any number of ways.

A hawk wheeled overhead in the blue. Somewhere in the fields of ripening grain scurried the rabbits and mice on which it lived. Lanius couldn't see them or smell them, but the hawk could. As often as not, peasants shot at hawks or netted them because they sometimes stole chickens and ducks. Lanius thought they did more good than harm, and by a wide margin, too.

He wondered if a royal edict would keep peasants from killing them. As far as he knew, no king had ever issued a decree like that. In the back of his mind, he heard Grus saying,
Don't make a law if you can't enforce it. People won't obey it, and they won't respect the other laws so much, either.

That was probably true, however little he cared for it. And he knew he could not force people to obey a law protecting hawks. He sighed. Good ideas often broke to pieces when they ran up against brute fact.

The road was dusty. The only time roads weren't dusty was when they were muddy, which made them worse. How much would cobblestoning all the kingdom's main roads cost, how long would it take, and how many men would it need?
Too much, too long, and too many
—the answer formed almost as fast as the question.

Collurio and his son didn't know the king was coming. The animal trainer greeted him with a bow and the words, “By the gods, Your Majesty, you were right.”

“Was I?” Lanius always liked hearing that. “Uh, about what?”

“About hawks, Your Majesty,” Collurio replied. “The soldiers have shot three of them that tried to swoop down on the moncat.”

“Have
they?” Lanius said, surprised in spite of his precautions.

Collurio nodded. “They sure have. One eagle—biggest bird I've ever seen, I think—one fish-hawk, and one ordinary hawk. Others were circling around, too, but they didn't do anything more than circle. It was almost like they knew to stay away from the archers' bows.”

“Was
it?” Lanius said, and Collurio nodded again. The king plucked at his rather unkempt beard. “Isn't that interesting?” He remembered the hawk he'd seen floating in the air earlier in the day. Maybe it hadn't been thinking about mice and rabbits. Maybe it had been thinking of moncats instead. And maybe the Banished One had been doing its thinking for it.

Grus looked down into the well. The stench wafting up from the shaft told him what the Menteshe had done, but he wanted to see for himself. Sure enough, the cut-up carcasses of a couple of sheep, or possibly goats, bobbed in the water.

Hirundo looked down the shaft, too. “Well, we won't get any use out of that one,” he said matter-of-factly.

“They've poisoned quite a few of them,” Grus said. “It's getting to be a nuisance.” It was getting to be more than a nuisance, but he tried to admit as little as he could, even to himself.

“Where there's one well, odds are we can dig another one close by,” Hirundo said.

“Yes, that's true, but whenever we have to stop and dig, it takes time,” the king answered. “I worry about every day we don't spend pushing on toward Yozgat. You can only stretch a campaigning season so far.”

“If we can get supplies down from the north, we'll do all right,” Hirundo said. “We
could
stay through the winter if we had to. No blizzards to worry about here, not like in the Chernagor country or even in Avornis.”

“No, I suppose not.” Grus looked south just the same. If the Banished One wanted to badly enough, could he bring a snowstorm screaming down on an army besieging Yozgat? Grus didn't know, and hoped he wouldn't have to find out the hard way. He brought his thoughts back to more immediate worries. “Do we have enough water to keep moving?”

“For now, yes,” Hirundo answered. “If we don't come across any in the next couple of days, then we have a problem. But I'm not going to fret about that. Something will turn up. It usually does.”

“I hope so.” Grus envied the general's easy optimism. Hirundo had been saying things like that his whole life long, and he'd been right most of the time. If he happened to be wrong here, that would be more than a problem. It would be a disaster. The king pounded a fist against his thigh. “This country is a lot drier than Avornis.”

“We've managed to get this far.” Yes, Hirundo had no trouble staying cheerful. “Yozgat's just over the next rise—oh, not really, but close enough. Don't worry, Your Majesty. We'll do all right.”

“Maybe we will,” said Grus, who certainly wanted to believe it. “This is liable to be hard on the thralls, though. Everything lately has been hard on those poor people—war across their fields, the plague during the winter, and now this.”

“Not everything,” Hirundo said. “They're free—the ones who are left are free, anyhow. And I'll tell you something else, Your Majesty. I'll bet the freed ones will know of more wells and such than the Menteshe do. If we run into what looks like trouble, asking them is likely to do us more good than anything else.”

“Mm, I'd say that's a pretty good bet,” Grus agreed after a little thought. “And it's something the Banished One and the Menteshe are liable to miss. Who pays attention to thralls unless he has to?”

“We do,” Hirundo answered.

Grus nodded, wondering whether that was a weakness the enemy could exploit or a strength that might help Avornis win this struggle. He had no idea—it would all depend on how things played out. And caring about the thralls also might turn out not to matter one way or the other.

The army did move forward, and found more poisoned wells in its path. Men and animals started getting thirsty. Most streams were either dry or tiny trickles in the summer heat. Grus sent wizards ahead with the scouts, to bring freedom to some thralls and try out Hirundo's notion.

It worked even better than the general might have guessed. The thralls found wells and streams and even a pond the Menteshe had missed. The army got enough water to keep going—not a lot of water, but enough. And the thralls, even with the darkness freshly lifted from their spirits, were not just willing but eager to do all they could for the Avornans. The Menteshe had been hard on them and hard on their ancestors for hundreds of years. How much of that oppression did they really understand? Enough to know which side they were on; that was clear.

“Well, you were right,” Grus told his general as they encamped for the night.

Hirundo bowed. “Thank you kindly, Your Majesty. One of the reasons people want to do things for you is that you say things like that. Plenty would just take the credit, whether it belonged to them or not.”

“I've known officers like that—who hasn't? Nothing's ever their fault, either,” Grus said. Hirundo nodded. The king continued, “If you have a choice, you'd rather lean on the other kind. I do try to remember that myself.”

Hirundo bowed again. He didn't say anything. His silence was part of the price Grus paid for being king. If he had spoken, Grus was sure he would have said something like,
Most people would forget all about that as soon as they got a crown on their head.
It was probably—no, certainly—true, but it wasn't the sort of thing you told a sovereign, even an easygoing one.

The Menteshe didn't need long to realize something had gone wrong. Seeing the Avornans moving forward, seeing their animals healthy and not on their last legs, told the nomads Grus' army had found water one way or another. But the nomads didn't turn any special savagery against the thralls. It was as though they couldn't imagine those near-beasts doing anything for good or ill—doing anything at all, except what beasts did.

Instead, with a fury that seemed to Grus not far from despair, the Menteshe struck at the Avornan army. As always, they hit hard. Volleys of arrows stung Grus' force. Wounded men and wounded horses screamed. The Avornans wavered. If the nomads had kept pelting them with arrows from long range, they might have broken.

What saved the Avornans were the siege engines rattling along in the baggage train. Those could hit the Menteshe where Avornan archery couldn't. And, as always, each of the flying stone balls and stout darts did far more damage than a mere arrow could have. The Menteshe abruptly seemed to lose patience with the long-range duel. Shouting curses in their own language, they charged.

In charging, they threw away the advantage they'd enjoyed. They'd had the better of the missile duel even if they didn't like stones flying their way. At close quarters, the Avornans, who wore heavier armor and rode sturdier horses, had the edge.

The Menteshe didn't need long to realize they'd made a mistake. By the time they did, though, it was too late. They were already entangled with the Avornans. Getting out of trouble proved harder than getting into it, which was usually true. The Avornan lancers and archers and spear-carrying foot soldiers made the Menteshe sorry they hadn't stayed farther away.

And when the nomads did finally break free, they were too battered and too disorganized to go back to the strategy that had worked well for them before. They were also too closely pursued. They rode off toward the south. Grus didn't push the pursuit hard. That would have let his men get shaken out into loose order, where they would be vulnerable to the nomads. He wanted to play to his own countrymen's strengths as long as he could.

Watching the Menteshe retreat, Hirundo said, “That will give them something to think about.”

“I hope so,” Grus said. “They tried to stop us with filth in the wells, and they couldn't. And they tried to stop us with soldiers again, and they couldn't do that, either. What have they got left?”

“They may have more fight left in them. They're tough,” the general answered. “And then, if they keep losing, they stand siege in Yozgat. The place is supposed to be formidable.”

“We'll find out how formidable it is,” Grus said. Like Hirundo, he was looking south. Hirundo no doubt thought he was thinking of the city where the Scepter of Mercy had lain for so long. And so he was, but he was also looking farther south still, toward the Argolid Mountains. What would the Banished One do if—no, probably when—the Avornan army encircled the city?
We'll find out,
Grus thought again.

Pouncer knew what to do, every step of the way. King Lanius watched as the moncat proved as much in the city slice he'd had Tinamus design and build. “Look at him go!” Lanius exclaimed.

“He's a remarkable animal, Your Majesty,” Collurio agreed. “It's been a … a privilege working with him.”

“You started to say something else,” Lanius told him. “What was it? A pleasure? But you didn't say that.”

“No, I didn't. The moncat pushes back too hard to make it a pleasure,” Collurio said.

After a few heartbeats, Lanius shook his head. “I don't think that's quite right. It's just that, well, a moncat is a cat. Pouncer will do what Pouncer wants to do, not what we want him to do. The trick is to get the miserable creature to want to do what we want him to do—and not to knock him over the head with a rock when he doesn't want to do it.”

“Yes—and that last,” Collurio agreed with a weary smile. “Anyone can tell you've had some experience with animals, Your Majesty.”

“And with children,” Lanius said.

That made the trainer laugh. “And with children,” he agreed. “Oh, yes. Children, though, mostly grow out of it. Beasts never do.”

“True enough.” But Lanius was thinking about Ortalis, and about how much beastliness he'd never grown out of. Collurio might have heard this or that about Ortalis; palace gossip always leaked out into the streets of the capital. The animal trainer didn't have to live with the prince, no matter what he'd heard. As far as Lanius was concerned, that made Collurio the lucky one.

Pouncer kept on with the routine it had learned. It knew where to go and what to do to earn each new reward. The moncat knew how to reverse its course, too. Lanius kept looking away from Pouncer and up into the sky. No hawks. No eagles. Not even a jay scolding people for being people. Just a few small white clouds drifting on a warm, lazy breeze.

“I'm glad you're here, Your Majesty. We're just coming to the hard part now,” Collurio said. “Crinitus and I are going to start widening the distances between rewards. We'll set them out in every other usual place, so the moncat will have to go twice as far between them. Then we'll double the distance again, and so on until we have what you want.”

The trainer only knew what the king wanted. He remained unsure why Lanius wanted it. Lanius didn't enlighten him. The less the trainer knew, the safer he was—and the safer Pouncer was. Collurio had already drawn the Banished One's interest. If the exiled god looked his way again …

“Have you had any more dreams?” Lanius asked. “Has Crinitus had any?”

“Dreams?” Collurio looked blank for a moment, but only for a moment. “Oh,
those
dreams! No, the gods in the heavens be praised, I haven't. That one was plenty to last me a lifetime. I don't
think
my son has. If he had, I expect he would have said so.”