The Bastard King (50 page)

And then, all at once, the whole rebel line gave way. Pandion's soldiers scattered, throwing away weapons and helmets to flee the faster. The castle opened its gates. Many of the fugitives made for that shelter, but Grus' men came hard on their heels. Grus wondered if enough of his men would get in along with Pandion's to let them seize the fortress from the inside. He vastly preferred that to besieging it.

But he hadn't even ridden up to inspect the castle at close range before a shout rose from his horsemen. "Pandion!" they cried. For a moment, he feared some few of them, or maybe more than some few, had gone over to the baron. Then he realized they'd captured Pandion.

The fortress kept Grus' soldiers out by slamming the gates shut on many of the rebels. The men who couldn't get in threw down swords and spears - those who hadn't already - threw their hands up, and surrendered in droves.

Grus waited till Pandion was hauled before him. The baron was blockily built, with a fuzzy gray beard. Several different kinds of fear warred on his face as he stared at Grus. "You wizard!" he burst out. "How did you get here so fast, with so godscursed many men? You're supposed to be fighting the Thervings!"

"Life is full of surprises, isn't it?" Grus plucked at his own beard. "Now, what am I going to do with you?"

"Take my head - what else?" Pandion owned a certain bleak courage, or perhaps just knew he had nothing to lose.

"Maybe not," Grus said. Watching hope fight not to come back to the baron's face was like watching a youth trying not to look at a girl with whom he was desperately, hopelessly, in love. The king went on, "If you order your stronghold to open its gates and yield to me, I'll send you to the Maze instead. You can keep Corvus company. Of course, if they don't listen to you in there ... Well, that would be too bad. For you."

"I'll persuade them," Pandion said quickly.

He did, too. Grus had expected that he could. His men wouldn't have followed him into rebellion if they weren't in the habit of obeying him. The sun was still an hour above the western horizon when Grus' men marched into the fortress. They disarmed the soldiers who'd fought for the baron and sent them back to their farms. The peasants were almost wild with relief; they'd been sure they would be massacred if they lost.

"That's how kings does things," one of them said in Grus' hearing. But this wasn't Grus' first round of civil war. He'd seen how Avornis was wounded no matter which side won the fighting. Being as moderate as he could helped.

"Will you let me bring my wives along?" Pandion asked after the castle yielded.

"They can go to the Maze with you, if they want," Grus answered. "They'll go to convents, as you're off to be a cleric. Or they can stay in the world and find new husbands. I won't tell them what to do."

Neither of Pandion's wives seemed the least interested in abandoning the world for his sake. That left the baron affronted and gloomy. He got even gloomier when Grus ordered his two eldest sons - youths not far from Ortalis and Lanius' age - into the Maze with him. So did the youngsters. Grus was unyielding.

"You all have another choice, if you really want one," he told Pandion and his sons.

"What's that?" the baron asked. Grus folded his arms across his chest and waited. Pandion didn't need long to figure out why. "Uh, Your Majesty?" he added.

"Your heads can go up over the gate of your castle here," Grus said. "That's as much of a choice as you get. This is not a friendly chat we're having here, remember. You tried to rise up against me. You lost. Now you're going to pay the price." He gestured to the soldiers who had charge of the baron and his sons. "Take them away. I think they've made up their minds."

Pandion didn't tell him he was wrong.

Nicator said, "Well, Your Majesty, that was a very pretty little campaign. Very pretty indeed, matter of fact."

Grus surveyed the field. Ravens and crows hopped from one corpse to the next, pecking at eyes and tongues and other such dainties. Vultures spiraled down out of the sky to join them at the bounteous feast people had laid out. The wounded from both sides has been gathered up, but they still moaned or sometimes screamed as surgeons and wizards tried to repair what edged and pointed metal had done to them. The odors of blood and dung hung in the air.

"Yes, very pretty," Grus said tonelessly, "and may we never see an ugly one."

Sosia said, "I'm going to have another baby."

"I thought so," Lanius answered. "Your courses didn't come, and you've been sleepy all the time lately...." He chuckled. "I know the signs now."

"You'd better," his wife said. "If you'd forgotten, I'd be angry."

He gave her a kiss. "I wouldn't do that."

"No, I know you wouldn't," Sosia agreed. "I could say this, that, or the other thing about you, but you don't forget much. Once you notice something, it's yours forevermore. Getting you to notice ... Sometimes that's a different story."

"What do you mean?" Lanius asked, more than a little indignantly. He didn't like to think of himself as missing anything.

"Never mind," Sosia said, which was not at all what he wanted to hear.

Quarreling with his wife over a trifle would have been foolish, though, especially when she'd given him news like that. He kissed her again. In a pear tree outside the bedroom window, a cuckoo called. The day was breathlessly hot, with not a breeze stirring. The bird called again, then fell silent, as though even song were too much effort.

After a few more minutes, the cuckoo did call once more. Lanius laughed as a new thought crossed his mind. "I wonder what the moncats are doing right now," he said.

Sosia laughed, too. "Why do you wonder? They're trying to get the bird. If one of them can find a way out through a window, he'll do it, too."

"I know," Lanius said. "We've made sure the bars are too narrow to let them get out, but the moncats keep working away anyhow."

"They're stubborner than ordinary cats," Sosia said.

"I don't know whether they're stubborner or just wilder," Lanius said. "They do keep working at it, as you say." He put a hand on his wife's shoulder. "And so do we."

"Yes, we do." She smiled. "I wonder if we don't get along better than my father ever thought we would."

"That had occurred to me, too," Lanius said slowly. "I didn't want to say anything, for fear of making you angry - and maybe making him angry, too - but it had crossed my mind. I won't try to tell you any differently."

"It doesn't really matter, you know," Sosia said.

"Oh, yes. Whether you're on your father's side or mine, what King Grus wants is what Avornis is going to get. I know that. I'd better know it. He's rubbed my nose in it often enough."

He bred moncats and helped the mothers raise the kittens. He went into the archives almost every day, soaking up more lore from the ancient days of Avornis. Without false modesty, he knew he'd learned as much about the past of the city and the kingdom as any man living.

And so what?
he asked himself.
What good does that do you ? What good does it do Avornis ?
He found no good answers, none at all. As long as he played with things that had no possible consequences, he made King Grus happy. If ever he didn't, if ever he tried to do anything substantial... He didn't know exactly what would happen, but he had a good idea of the range of possibilities. He might end up in the Maze. On the other hand, he might end up dead. And whether Sosia was on his side or not wouldn't matter a bit.

When Grus came back from beating Pandion, Lanius congratulated him in front of the whole city of Avornis. He felt the irony as he mouthed the words. It wasn't that he'd wanted Pandion to overthrow Grus. He hadn't. Lanius had wanted Pandion no more than he wanted Grus - less, in fact.

What Lanius wanted, as he'd once told Grus, was no protector at all. Though he was King of Avornis, that seemed to be one thing he couldn't have.

He retreated into the archives. There, at least, he was master of his world, even if that world was a small one. He pored over some of the oldest records there, trying to learn all he could of the Banished One. But there seemed to be less to learn than he would have hoped. As far as the royal chronicles told the story, the Banished One had simply appeared in the south one day. The power he showed was far beyond any merely earthly - any merely mortal - power. And the exile hadn't aged, either. That became obvious after a generation, and still seemed true today, all these centuries later. Generations meant nothing to the Banished One. By anything the records showed, centuries meant nothing to him, either.

What would the world be like if Olor hadn't cast him out?
Lanius wondered. He had no way of answering that. Neither did anyone else. He couldn't even prove the world would be better. Maybe the long struggle against the Banished One had strengthened, steeled, Avornis. Maybe. He couldn't prove it hadn't. But he doubted it.

He kept hoping his reading would give him some clue or another about the Banished One's weaknesses. The more he read, the more he doubted that, too. As far as he could tell, the Banished One
had
no weaknesses - not in the humanly recognizable sense of the word. He wasn't as strong as a god, not while his self, his essence, rested in the material world rather than in the heavens beyond. Had he been that strong, he would have ruled the world from the moment he found himself cast down into it.

Suddenly, Lanius had a new thought, one that he didn't believe had occurred to any Avornan for many long years before his time. Before being cast down from the heavens, the Banished One had surely been a god himself. Which god had he been? Over what heavenly province or attribute had he ruled? The king had never seen the question, let alone the answer, in the royal archives.

I might be able to find out,
Lanius realized. Not many records survived from the days before the Banished One came down to earth, but a few did. If they mentioned a god who was no longer worshiped ...

That thought led to another -
I wish Bucco weren't dead.
The old arch-hallow had been a conniver, a serpent, but he'd also been a learned man. He might have known the answer to Lanius' question, or at least how to go about finding the answer. The clerics had records of their own, records that went back at least as far as those in the royal archives.

Anser wouldn't know. Anser wouldn't care, either. Lanius snapped his fingers. "A secretary will know," he said aloud. "Secretaries always know." Top officials came and went. Secretaries went on forever. They were the memory of Avornis. "When I get around to it, I'll ask one of the arch-hallow's secretaries. He may not know the answer, but he'll know where to find out."

He knew it wasn't anything he had to do in a hurry. The answer, if indeed it existed in the clerics' archives, had been sitting there for centuries. A few days one way or the other weren't going to matter.

And then a messenger came riding into the city of Avornis from out of the west. He'd almost killed his horse; it was lathered and blowing under him. And the news he brought to the royal palace drove any thoughts of the Banished One and the clerics' archives right out of Lanius' head.

"King Dagipert is dead!" the messenger cried. "Dagipert of Thervingia is dead at last!"

King Grus sat on the royal throne. "Give me all you know about what happened in Thervingia."

"I only know it was sudden," the man replied. "One day he was ruling the kingdom, the next he was dead. The gods finally got tired of him tormenting us."

"Well, he's in their hands now," Grus said. "I'm going to - " He stopped.

"Going to what, Your Majesty?" the messenger asked.

"Nothing. Never mind." Grus had started to say he was going to order the cathedrals to offer up prayers of thanksgiving for Dagipert's death. But the Thervings worshiped the same gods Avornis did. Publicly thanking those gods for ridding the world of King Dagipert would have insulted Thervingia. Better for Grus to offer his own private thanksgiving. Remembering the niceties, he said, "I'll have to send Prince Berto - King Berto, now - my condolences."

Lanius had said Berto was a man more interested in cathedrals and prayer than in coming over the border at the head of a long column of warriors in chain mail carrying axes.
I'll send some fine Avornan architects to Thervingia to build him there the fanciest cathedral his heart desires.
Making Berto happy that way had to be cheaper than fighting a war.

"It's the end of an era," the messenger said.

King Grus nodded. "It certainly is. King Dagipert was a strong man and a nasty foe." He added, "You'll have your reward, of course, for bringing the news here so quickly. There's not much that could be more important."

The messenger bowed. Grus caught a distinct whiff of horse from him; he'd ridden hard indeed. "Thank you for your kindness, Your Majesty," he said.

"You're welcome. You've earned it. That's the point."

Another bow. "Thank you again. I was thinking, the only thing bigger than Dagipert dying'd be the gods-cursed Menteshe invading us again. Thank the gods they've been quiet lately."

"Yes." Grus had no idea how much the gods did, or could do, to stop the Menteshe - and the Banished One, their patron - from acting as they pleased. They'd cast the Banished One into the material world and then turned their backs on him... hadn't they?

He couldn't be sure. He needed to remind himself of that every now and again. If he couldn't fully understand the Banished One, who dwelt in this world with him, how could he hope to understand the gods still up in the heavens?

Stick to affairs of this world, then,
he told himself. To a junior courtier, he said, "Fetch General Hirundo, if you'd be so kind."

The man went off at a run. A polite request from the king counted as an order, and he knew it.

Hirundo came to the throne room in a hurry, too. Grus smiled, if only to himself. He'd discovered people paid much more attention to his commands now that he was king than they ever had when he was a mere commodore of river galleys. "You'll have heard the news?" he asked the general.