The Bastard King (54 page)

Bobbing a curtsy, the wet nurse left the chamber. Sosia yawned again, even wider than before. "Sleep if you want to," Lanius told her. "By the gods, you've earned the right."

"If I sleep now, I won't sleep tonight," Sosia answered. "Then I'll be just as sleepy tomorrow."

"I wonder how people ever catch up on sleep till a baby starts sleeping through the night - especially people without servants," Lanius said.

"If you really want to know, you could ask my mother," Sosia said.

"I did that when Crex was born," Lanius answered. "What she said was,'Mostly, you don't sleep.'"

Sosia yawned one more time. "She's right."

River galleys patrolled the Stura, gliding up and down the river. Standing at the stern of one of them, King Grus felt years slide from his age. He felt as though he were commanding a flotilla again, on the lookout for an invasion from the south. He'd spent a lot of time doing that, and thought he'd done it well. It was certainly a simpler job than King of Avornis.

Having Alca up at the river galley's bow reminded him he still wore those years. The invasion he was looking for wasn't of hard-riding Menteshe horsemen. He wanted to keep more thralls from crossing the Stura and coming up into Avornis. He didn't know what to do with the ones he had. He knew he didn't want to have to deal with any more of them.

"Boat!" shouted a lookout standing not far from the witch. "Boat in the river!" He pointed toward the southern bank of the Stura.

Grus saw the boat, too. He nodded to the oarmaster and the helmsman. "We're going to sink it."

"Aye, aye, sir." The oarmaster upped the stroke.

"Yes, Your Majesty." The helmsman tugged at the steering oar, guiding the galley at the little rowboat ahead. Even as he did so, though, he asked, "Do we really have to do this? He's just trying to get away from the gods-cursed Menteshe."

"I know." Grus wasn't happy about it, either. "If the thralls were ordinary men, I'd be glad to have them. Even if every third one spied for the Banished One, I'd be glad to have them. We can always use peasants who'll settle down and work. I'd take them up near the border with Thervingia, where we've lost so many farmers of our own. But what can we do with thralls?"

"I don't know, sir," the helmsman admitted.

"Neither do I," Grus said. "I wish I did. They're the Banished One's creatures. If we use them, so are we."

The rowboat drew close as the river galley bore down on it. The thrall in the boat had wit enough to use the oars. But he was so intent on crossing the Stura and getting to the north bank, he never paid the least attention to the galley. Any normal man would have noticed the long, lean, deadly craft speeding toward his boat. Any normal man would have tried to get away, or at least would have cursed the sweating, grunting oarsmen who propelled the galley at him. The thrall just kept on rowing.

A river galley was built to ram another ship of its own kind without coming to grief. It made quick work of the flimsy little rowboat. Grus hardly staggered when the warship rolled over the boat. He got a brief glimpse of the thrall struggling in the Stura. Then the river galley was past.

"Well, there's one of die bastards we don't have to worry about anymore," the oarmaster said as his drum let the rowers ease back.

"Yes," Grus replied, but that was only partially true. He didn't have to worry that that thrall would splash up onto Avornan soil. He looked back over his shoulder. No, that thrall would never come up again. But the reason he'd set out to escape the Menteshe remained a mystery.

Grus knew that, for all his vigilance, he couldn't keep all the thralls who wanted to from crossing the Stura. More and more of them began trying it at night, when the galleys couldn't patrol. Soldiers and farmers who found them brought them to Cumanus, where they went into the amphitheater, and to other towns along the Stura.

"How do they know?" Grus asked Alca one evening.

"How does who know what, Your Majesty?" the witch said.

"How do the thralls know they have a better chance of crossing the Stura at night?" King Grus replied.

"It only stands to reason that..." Alca stopped, looking foolish. "Oh. I see what you mean. What do thralls know about reason?"

Grus nodded. "Yes, that's what I was thinking."

"A couple of things occur to me," the witch said. "One is that thralls do use words - after a fashion. That has to mean they're able to think after a fashion, too."

"Maybe," Grus said, but he didn't believe it. "And?"

"The Banished One may be telling them what to do, either directly or through the Menteshe."

King Grus contemplated that. "Well, you're right," he said. "I don't like it a bit. How can you tell whether it's so?"

"I can ask some of the thralls who've crossed the Stura at night whether the Menteshe told them to cross then," Alca said.

"And if they say no, or if you can't tell? How can you find out whether the Banished One gave them a direct order?"

The witch sighed. "I could ask them that, too, I suppose. I don't want to try to use magic to find out. I've been lucky enough to live through that sort of magic twice. The thrall the second time wasn't so lucky, though. And next time it might be me."

"Yes, I understand that," Grus said. "I won't ask you to try anything that might hurt you. I would like to know, though." He paused in thought. "Can you use a truth spell to see if what you're getting out of them is worth having?"

"I can try," Alca answered. "That shouldn't make me run directly up against the Banished One's wizardry, which is what I want
not
to do."

Accompanied by Grus' guards, the witch and the king went back to the amphitheater the next morning. Guardsmen brought another thrall out of the excavated pit. The woman stared at Alca with mild, incurious eyes. She brushed at her filthy, scraggly hair - an absentminded gesture.

Absentminded is right,
Grus thought.
If so much of her mind weren't absent, we wouldn't be doing this now.
Alca asked, as she had before, "Why did you cross the Stura? Why did you come into Avornis?"

The thrall stared at her. A frown spread over the woman's dirty, sun-wrinkled face. "Had to," she said at last, her voice rusty from disuse.

"I see." Alca nodded briskly, as though speaking to someone in full possession of her wits. "And why did you have to?"

Another frown from the thrall. She might have been thinking over her answer. She might have been, but she probably wasn't. "Told me," she said at last. Her Avornan was an old-fashioned dialect, with a hissing accent surely taken from the Menteshe who ruled on the southern bank of the river.

"Ah." Alca turned to King Grus. "Now, with a little luck, we begin to learn something. I have the spell ready to go."

"Good," Grus said.

"I hope it's for the good," Alca said. "Remember what happened to that other thrall." She began to make passes in the air in front of her as she asked the woman thrall, "Who told you you had to come here?"

"He did," the woman replied at once.

Alca muttered something under her breath that was more fitting of a longshoreman than a witch. "Let's try again," she said, and repeated the series of passes. "Who was he?" she asked when they were done.

"Him who told me," the thrall said.

The witch muttered some more, louder this time. The thrall ignored that. She looked down at her hands, which were worn and scarred from a lifetime's carelessness and toil. Alca gathered herself. To Grus, she said, "So far, the woman is telling the truth. The only trouble is, it's not a useful truth."

"Is she talking that way on purpose?" Grus asked.

"I don't know," Alca told him. "I hope not. If she - or rather, if the wizardry inside her - is having sport with me ..." She muttered yet again. "I can't think of a worse insult."

"What can you do about it?" the king asked.

"I don't know. I don't know whether I can do anything," Alca answered. "That's part of what makes it such an insult." She turned back to the thrall. "Did a mortal man tell you to come here?" The woman shook her head. Alca brightened. "Did one who isn't mortal tell you to come here?"

The woman shook her head again.

"Has to be one or the other," Grus said.

"With the Banished One, who knows?" Alca replied. She turned back to the female thrall, took a deep breath, and asked, "Did the Banished One tell you to leave your home and come into Avornis?"

Alca visibly braced herself, waiting for the woman's answer. Grus could hardly blame her, remembering the magic back at the royal palace and remembering the thrall falling over dead here at the amphitheater in Cumanus. The woman grinned - not an expression of mirth, but one that made her look uncommonly like a skull with glittering eyes. "I know," she whispered, and nodded. "Yes, I know."

"Then tell me," the witch commanded. But the woman only kept staring, that - mocking? - grin showing snaggled teeth, several of them broken. Alca's lips thinned in anger at being defied. "In the names of the gods - in the holy names of King Olor and Queen Quelea - tell me!"

The thrall woman's grin vanished, to be replaced by a snarl of hate. "Those names mean nothing to me here. Nothing! Less than nothing!" The voice with which she spoke was not her own, but a resonant baritone. For a moment, it put Grus in mind of the late Arch-Hallow Bucco's golden tones. Then, involuntarily, the king shook his head. Bucco would have killed to claim the sounds coming from this woman's mouth. She - or that which spoke through her - went on, "They cast me down from my rightful place. They sent me hither. That place, they say, is theirs. This place, then, is mine. They trifle with me here at their peril. And one day, I shall see them again in their own habitation, which is mine as well. Then shall they learn even there that they trifled with me at their peril."

After that outburst, the thrall went limp in the guards' arms. Her eyes sagged shut. She still breathed, though, and when Grus felt for a pulse he found one. "Are you answered?" he asked Alca. His voice wobbled. He knew more than a little pride that he'd managed to speak at all,

"I don't know," she answered, and her voice shook, too. "That the Banished One spoke through her there - who could doubt it? But did he himself set upon her the impulse to flee north? Did he himself, or some part of his essence, dwell within her all this while? Did he know we were questioning her? I don't know. How can I tell?"

"What of your truth spell?" Grus asked.

"What of it?" Alca returned. "She - or the Banished One through her - spoke the truth, I think. But he never answered the question I asked."

"Mph." Grus grunted, thinking back. "Yes, you're right. But the woman - or the Banished One - spoke the truth?"

"As far as I could tell. And that spell is a good one," Alca said.

"Does that mean the gods truly mean nothing to the Banished One?" Grus asked. If it
did
mean that, if the Banished One
was
supreme in this world as the gods were in the heavens ... If that was so, what point to any of his struggles? None he could see, none at all.

But the witch shook her head. "He said their
names
meant nothing to him. That, I think, is true. But he is ever one to twist truth and turn it, so that we see it in mirrors within mirrors within mirrors. Take care with him and his words, Your Majesty. Always take care. That their names mean nothing to him does not mean their essence means nothing."

Grus shivered. "I hope you're right. If you're wrong ... If you're wrong, we can never hope to beat him, can we?"

Alca shrugged. "What difference does it make? If the Banished One ever swallows Avornis, all of us will be made into thralls. You can look at things however you please. Me, I'd rather be dead. Dead, I know I'm out of his grasp."

"Something to that." Grus looked down into the amphitheater. The thralls in there were indifferent to his presence. They were mostly indifferent to one another, too, though a couple of them sat side by side, picking lice and fleas from each other's shaggy hair and ragged clothes. The sight didn't reassure Grus. Lanius' moncats might have done the same.

"I wish we could free them," Alca said. "Free all of them, I mean, not just the few here where we have at least a chance of eventually lifting the spells that cloud their minds." She looked south, toward the Stura and beyond. In a whisper, she went on, "So many of them under the Banished One's hand. And yet their ancestors were Avornans, just as ours were. It isn't right that they should be made into beasts."

"No, it isn't," Grus agreed. "Winning a war against the Menteshe - and against the Banished One - won't be easy, though. Crossing the Stura to win wars against them would be even harder than beating them back from our own land."

He thought about Lanius again. Lanius knew more Avornan history than Grus cared to contemplate. He knew how many efforts to push the border south of the Stura once more had come to grief. He would undoubtedly be able to give plenty of good reasons why one more would come to grief, too.

One of those good reasons also seemed only too obvious to Grus. "How can we possibly hope to beat the Banished One?" he asked. "Every time Avornis has tried to cross the Stura since the Menteshe took the Scepter of Mercy from us, we've had disasters." He'd known that much before Lanius gave him the gruesome details, though he hadn't known how gruesome they were.

"Mostly, he works through men," Alca insisted. "We can beat the Menteshe taken by themselves, can't we? If we can't do that, all else fails."

"True." Grus made a sour face. "Some of the princes who rule the Menteshe aren't anything much. Prince Ulash, though, who holds the lands right across the river from where we are now... He's a cunning old fox, Ulash is. He'd be no bargain even if the Banished One didn't back him."

"Why worry about him, then? Why not go after some of the others - some of the easier ones?"

"For one thing, if we get tied up in a war somewhere else along the river, what's he likely to do? Jump on us with both feet, that's what. And, for another" - King Grus lowered his voice, not that that was likely to do him much good - "Wash's capital is Yozgat."