The Bastard King (31 page)

"Really? Why on earth would you say such a thing? Because I'm as graceful as a sack of beans on horseback?"

"Well, now that you mention it, yes."

"So what?" Grus said. "I give the men something to laugh at. Better they could laugh than quiver in their boots for fear of bumping into Dagipert and the Thervings."

"When you put it that way, maybe," Hirundo said.

"Whether I'm a horseman or not, Colonel, I have my reasons for coming along, believe you me I do," Grus said. "I don't want to stay in the capital the rest of my days. I want to see more of Avornis than that. How can I deal with what goes on in the kingdom if I don't keep an eye on it?"

"Plenty of Kings of Avornis have tried," Hirundo observed. Like Grus, he had risen in the world since their wars against the Menteshe in the south.

"I don't intend to be one of them," Grus said.

He was glad to escape the capital, even if escaping it meant going into battle against the Thervings. An army on the march, he was discovering, was different from a fleet of river galleys on the move. In one way, the army had the advantage - it could go anywhere, while available waterways limited the fleet. But the army carried its own stink with it, a heavy odor compounded of the smells of horses and unwashed men. It stayed in Grus' nostrils and would not go away. Even after his conscious mind forgot about it, it lingered. He smelled it in his dreams.

He led the soldiers west, toward Thervingia, toward danger. No one could doubt the Thervings had used this route to come through Avornis and approach the capital in the recent past. The signs were all too clear - torched villages, empty farmsteads, fields that should have been full of ripening grain going to weeds, instead. Once, Grus' army came upon what was left of a detachment of Avornan soldiers King Dagipert's men had met and overwhelmed. Not much remained of the Avornans - only a few scattered bones still recognizable as human, and fragments of clothing enough to identify them as Grus' countrymen. The Thervings had stolen everything they found worth taking.

"This could happen to us, too," Grus told the men he led. "It could - if we aren't careful. If we are, though, nothing can beat us. We just have to watch ourselves, don't we?"

"Yes," the soldiers chorused dutifully. He also watched them, sometimes in ways they didn't expect. He posted extra sentries that evening on the roads leading east, for instance. Those sentries captured six or eight men trying to slip away from the danger they'd seen. Grus didn't make examples of them, as he might have. But he didn't let them desert, either. Back to the encampment they went.

Whenever the army passed woods on its way west, Grus sent scouts into them. He didn't want to give Dagipert the chance to ambush him, as the King of Thervingia had ambushed other Avornan armies. Three days after the army found what was left of that Avornan detachment, the scouts Grus sent to examine a frowning pine forest burst out of it much faster than they'd gone in. They came galloping back toward the main mass of men.

"Thervings!" they shouted. "The Thervings are in the woods!"

"Good!" Grus exclaimed, though he was anything but sure how good it was. "Now we can make them pay for what they've done to Avornis." He raised his voice to a shout like the one he might have used aboard a river galley.
"Revenge!"

"Revenge!" the soldiers echoed.

Grus had never led a battle on land before. He didn't try to lead this one now, either, not really. He'd brought Colonel Hirundo here for just that reason. Hirundo handled the job with unruffled competence. At his orders, horns bellowed from metal throats and signal flags waved. The Avornan soldiers shook themselves out, moving from column to line of battle as smoothly as Grus could have hoped. As they were deploying, Hirundo turned to Grus and asked, "What now, Your Majesty? Do we await the enemy on open ground here, or do we go into the woods after them?"

"Into the woods," Grus replied at once. "They won't surprise us now."

Hirundo nodded. "All right. I hoped you'd say that. If you'd care to do the honors ... ?"

"What do you - ? Oh." Grus raised his voice again, this time shouting, "
Forward
!"

The Avornans cheered as they began to advance. Grus and Hirundo both weighed those cheers, trying to gauge the army's spirit from them. At almost the same instant, they both nodded. Despite the attempted desertions a few nights before, the soldiers seemed ready enough to fight.

Well before the Avornans could push in among the pines, Thervings began emerging from them. They formed their own line of battle, which looked more rugged than the Avornans', then surged toward Grus' men, roaring like beasts.

"Come on, boys!" Colonel Hirundo called gaily. "Now we get to pay these bastards back for everything they've done to Avornis lately.
King Grus!"
When he used it, he had a pretty good battlefield roar himself.

"King Grus!" The shout rose from the Avornans. Men also yelled, "King Lanius!" Grus knew he couldn't complain about that. Lanius was, after all, still king, and they were cheering the dynasty as much as the young man.

To show he didn't mind, he shouted, "King Lanius!" himself, and then, "Avornis and victory!" He hoped it would be victory.

Dagipert's men, though, had other things in mind. They cried out their king's name, as well as guttural bits of Thervingian. Grus didn't know any of the mountain men's language, but doubted they were complimenting either Avornis or him.

Most of the Thervings were on foot. The Avornan army had more horsemen than foot soldiers. Hirundo led them to the wings, to try to outflank the Thervings and soften them up with arrows. The Thervings' riders stayed in the center of their line, in a tight knot around a wolfhide standard.
That's Dagipert's emblem,
Grus realized. He spurred toward it, brandishing his sword.

"Come on, Dagipert!" he yelled. "Fight me, or show yourself a coward!"

The King of Thervingia was at least twenty years older than he was. But if he could cut Dagipert down, he would cut the heart out of the Thervings.
And what if you fall yourself, instead? You're still a long way from the best horseman the gods ever made.
Once upon a time, a King of Thervingia had beaten a King of Avornis in single combat and made a drinking cup from his skull.

Grus wished he hadn't chosen that moment to remember that bit of lore. Lanius, no doubt, could have told him the names of both kings and whatever else he wanted to know about them - except that he didn't want to know anything. And he hadn't answered his own question. He tried now.
What if I fall, instead? Well, Avornis can get along better without me than Thervingia can without Dagipert. I'm pretty sure of that.

Forth from the Thervings' ranks came a rider with gilded chain mail and a long gray beard. "You pimp!" Dagipert roared at Grus. "Prostitute your daughter with my daughter's betrothed, will you?" If the King of Thervingia felt his years or anything but raw fury toward Grus, he didn't show it.

"I'll give your daughter to my hangman's son," Grus yelled back. Dagipert bellowed with fury.
Maybe he'll have a fit and fall over dead,
Grus thought hopefully. That would make his own life easier.

No such luck. Grus hadn't really expected it. The two kings traded sword strokes between their armies. Dagipert might have been old, but he knew how to handle a blade. And rage seemed to lend him strength. Before long, Grus knew he would be lucky to beat down his foe - would be lucky, in fact, to live.

But their private duel lasted only moments. Avornans rushed forward to help Grus rid the world of Dagipert. Thervings ran up to protect their king and assail Grus. In the battle that developed around them, Grus and Dagipert were swept apart. Grus was anything but sorry. He hoped he'd managed to put some fear into King Dagipert, too, but wouldn't have bet on it.

Meanwhile, of course, ordinary Thervings could kill him as readily as King Dagipert might have - more readily, in fact, for most of the Thervings were younger and better trained than their king. Grus thrust and parried and slashed. Before long, his sword had blood on it. The blood wasn't his, though he couldn't remember wounding any of the enemy.

"Grus!" his men shouted, and, "Avornis!" and, "Lanius!"

Hirundo's horsemen kept nipping in behind Dagipert's men, trying to cut them off from the woods and surround them. The Thervings detached men from their main line to hold off such flanking moves, which let the Avornans put more pressure on their front. Little by little, that front began to crumble.

Had it happened all at once, Dagipert's army would have fallen to pieces, and Grus might have won a famous victory, one that would have let him be talked about in the same breath with storied Kings of Avornis from far-off days. It didn't. The Thervings kept enough order to withdraw into the forest under good discipline, and he had no great inclination to go after them once they'd drawn back.

"Congratulations, Your Majesty!" said Colonel Hirundo, coming up to him after the fighting ended. "We beat them!"

"Yes." Wearily, Grus nodded. "And do you know what, Colonel? I'll take that. Considering everything that could have happened, I'll take it, and gladly."

Lanius had always loved the archives. They never argued with him. They never told him no. Not only had he learned a great deal going through them, he'd learned a great deal about how to learn. No one, not even his tutor, ever seemed to have thought about that. The more he did, though, the more important it seemed.

If he wanted to find out what had happened in ancient days, he went through chronicles, and through the reports generals and other officials had left behind - those were often the raw material from which the chroniclers shaped their stories. If he wanted to find out about money, he started pawing through tax rolls. If he found himself interested in sorcery, a separate part of the archives concerned itself with that. Knowing where and how to start looking was often as important as anything else when he was trying to find out something.

He breathed in the smells of old parchments and ink and dust as a lover breathed in his lover's perfume. And, when he decided to find out what the archives had to say about moncats, he went with confidence to the records of old-time Avornan sailing expeditions. In days gone by, Avornis had ruled the northern coast. That was before the Chernagors settled there and began squabbling with Avornis, amongst themselves, and against the Thervings.

Yaropolk hadn't told him the name of the island chain Iron and Bronze had come from. That would have made things easier, but he managed well enough without it. And poking through parchments, never quite sure what the next one would show, had a pleasure of its own. Some of those Avornan explorers had sailed a long way. Going through the records they'd left behind, Lanius felt like an explorer himself.

None of the records used the word
moncat;
that was just his translation of the name the Chernagors had given the creatures. Of course the old Avornan explorers, if they'd ever come across the animals, would have called them something else.

When he figured that out, he realized he would have to go back through several parchments he'd already set aside. That left him imperfectly delighted with the world, but he saw no help for it. By then, he was bound and determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. His father had been a stubborn man, too. Had Mergus not been, he never would have taken a seventh wife when Certhia found herself with child.

Lanius was in no position to defy the world. All he could do was try to learn something he wanted to know. King Grus was making sure nothing more important or glamorous would come his way.

One of the reports he came across for a second time had nothing to do with ships sailing out across the seas to the north. Just the opposite, in fact - it was an account by some intrepid Avornan who'd pushed far into the south not long after the Menteshe swept the Avornans out of that part of the world.

He started to put that book aside yet again. But the Avornan explorer, despite his old-fashioned language, wrote in an entertaining style. And so Lanius kept reading.

"Oh, by the gods!" he said in a low voice. Things down in the south had been a lot more chaotic in the old days than they were now. When Avornis and the Menteshe weren't fighting these days, they traded across the border. The Menteshe princes, though, made sure Avornans didn't go too far south of the frontier, while Avornans, fearing each nomad as the Banished One's eyes and ears, refused to let any Menteshe come very far north.

Once upon a time, it hadn't been like that. The fellow whose report Lanius was reading had gotten all the way down to Yozgat, where the Menteshe stowed away the Scepter of Mercy after capturing it from Avornis. That truly amazed Lanius. He hadn't had the faintest idea any Avornan had set eyes on it from the day the Menteshe took it till now. Yet here was a detailed description of the building where the nomads kept the Scepter. The explorer wrote:

Were it within the bounds of our own realm, I should without hesitation style it a cathedral. Yet that were false and misleading, the Menteshe now hallowing no other gods save only the false, vile, and wicked spirit cast from the heavens for that he was a sinner, the spirit known as the Banished One. Him do they worship. Him do they reverence, and give no tiniest portion of respect unto King Olor and Queen Quelea, the which thereof are truly deserving.

He went on for some little while, spewing forth one platitude after another. That tempted Lanius to put aside the old parchment after all. He didn't, though, and ended up glad he didn't, for the explorer went on,

At length, they suffered me to gaze upon this grand and holy relic, now no more than a spoil of war. Yet, like a slave woman once the beautiful and famous wife of some grand noble, it doth retain even in its lowly state a certain haggard loveliness. Indeed, I believe the building wherein it is enshrined was peradventure once a house for the proper gods, though now sadly changed into a hall in which the Banished One receives his undeserved praises of those he hath seduced away from truth and piety.