The Chernagor Pirates (19 page)

Crunch!
Again, the river galley shuddered as the ram struck home. Again, the oarmaster bellowed, “Back oars!” Again, the rowers pulled like men possessed. Again, Grus breathed a sigh of relief when the ram
did
pull free.

This time, though, the Chernagor ship didn't sink. The skipper ran her aground in the shallows before she filled too much and became altogether unmanageable. Pirates leaped off her and splashed ashore. Grus knew he would have to land men, too. The galleys had outpaced other forces following on the river and by land. If all the pirates had taken to their heels through the fields, they would have been very troublesome. The survivors from one ship? Probably not.

Hirundo seemed to think along the same lines. “Not
too
bad, Your Majesty,” he said.

“No, not too,” Grus agreed. “Not yet. But we've only just started cleaning them out. This is the first bunch we've run into, and maybe the smallest.”

Hirundo made a horrible face. Then, very reluctantly, he nodded.

King Lanius sat in the royal archives, delightfully encased in quiet. More dust motes than usual danced in the sunbeams that pushed through the dirty skylights overhead. Lanius had been shoving boxes around again, looking for interesting things he hadn't seen before. He often did that. He didn't often get rewarded as handsomely as he had this time.

He had to stop and think how long ago King Cathartes had reigned. Seven hundred years ago? Eight hundred? Something like that. Cathartes hadn't spent an especially long time on the Diamond Throne, nor had his reign been distinguished. But, like all Kings of Avornis until the Menteshe stole it, he'd wielded the Scepter of Mercy. Unlike most of them, he'd worked hard to describe what that was like.

Without both patience and luck, Lanius never would have come across the time-yellowed scrap of parchment. Patience encompassed the labor of digging out new boxes of documents and the different but even more wearing labor of going through them one by one to see what each was. Luck came in when King Cathartes' letter got stuck by fragments of wax from its seal to a much less interesting report on sheep farming in the Granicus valley that was only a quarter as old. If Lanius hadn't been paying attention, he would have put the report on wool and mutton aside without noticing it had another document riding on its back.

King Cathartes' script looked strange, but Lanius could puzzle it out. The language was old-fashioned, but not impossibly so. And Cathartes was talking about something that fascinated Lanius, so the present king worked especially hard.
Oft have men of me inquired, What feel you? What think you? on laying hold of the most excellent Scepter. Hath it the massiness of some great burthen in your hand, as seemingly it needs must, being of size not inconsiderable? Let all know, as others have said aforetimes, a man seizing the Scepter of Mercy in the cause of righteousness is in sooth likewise seized by the same.

Lanius wondered what the cause of righteousness was, and how any man, let alone a King of Avornis holding the Scepter of Mercy, could know he was following it. Did Cathartes mean the Scepter gave some sign of what was right and what wasn't? Perhaps he did, for he went on,
Know that, when rightly wielded, the Scepter weigheth in the hand, not naught
—
for that were, methinks, a thing impossible e'en 'mongst the gods
—
but very little, such that a puling babe, purposing to lift it for the said righteous cause, would find neither hindrance nor impediment.

But if a man depart from that which is good, if he purpose the use of the aforesaid Scepter of Mercy in a cause unjust, then will he find he may not lift it at all, but is prevented from all his ends,
Cathartes wrote.

“Well, well,” Lanius murmured. “Isn't that interesting?” It wasn't just interesting. It was new, and he'd almost despaired of finding anything new about the Scepter of Mercy. Most Kings of Avornis who'd written about it at all had been maddeningly vague, insisting the wielding of the Scepter was a matter of touch without ever explaining how. Cathartes had been far more forthcoming.

It also explained far more than Cathartes could have dreamed. For four hundred years, the Scepter of Mercy had lain in Yozgat. In all that time, so far as Lanius knew, the Banished One had never picked it up and used its powers against his foes. Like all Avornan kings over those four centuries, Lanius was glad the Banished One hadn't, but he'd never understood why not. Now, perhaps, he did. After the Menteshe brought it back to him, had he tried to lift it, tried and failed? No proof, of course. But it seemed more reasonable to Lanius than any other idea he'd ever had along those lines.

Maybe it meant even more than that. Maybe it meant the gods had been justified in casting Milvago down from the heavens, making him into the Banished One. Didn't it argue that his goal of forcing his way back into the heavens was anything but righteous? Or did it just say their magic rejected him even as they had themselves?

Lanius laughed.
How am I, one mortal man sitting by himself in these dusty archives, supposed to figure out all the workings of the gods?
If that wasn't unmitigated gall, he couldn't imagine what would be.

He wished he could talk with Grus about it. That failing, he wished Avornis had an arch-hallow whose passion was learning about and seeking to understand the gods, not tracking down a deer after he'd put an arrow in its side. Lanius might have trusted such an arch-hallow with the terrifying secret of Milvago. Anser? No. However much Lanius liked Grus' bastard, he knew he was a lightweight.

He even understood why Grus had chosen to invest Anser with the red robe. Anser was unshakably loyal to his father. (
And how many people are unshakably loyal to me?
Lanius wondered.
Is anyone?
) That had enormous advantages for the other king. But sometimes an arch-hallow who did more than fill space would have been useful. Lanius almost wished Bucco still led services in the cathedral, and Bucco would have married him off to King Dagipert of Thervingia's daughter if he'd had his way.

Now,
Lanius asked himself,
what to do with Cathartes' letter?
At first, he wanted to put it in some prominent place. Instead, he ended up using its bits of sealing wax to reattach it to the report on sheep in the Granicus valley to which it had clung for so long. Sometimes obscurity was best.

Only after Lanius had left the archives did he wonder whether that applied to him as well as to what King Cathartes had written all those years ago. Little by little, he'd realized he didn't much want to challenge Grus for the sole rule of Avornis, so maybe it did. And if he didn't, he might get along with—and work with—his father-in-law better than he ever had before.

Down the Granicus toward the Azanian Sea sailed the fleet of river galleys Grus commanded. Other flotillas and contingents of soldiers were, he hoped, clearing more of the Nine Rivers and their valleys of the Chernagor pirates.

He'd had to fight again, at Calydon. The Chernagors there weren't plundering the town. They were holding it, and hadn't intended to give it back to any mere Avornans. Grus used the same ploy he'd succeeded with against Baron Lev at the fortress of Varazdin. He made an ostentatious attack against the waterfront from the river. When he judged most of the pirates had rushed to that part of Calydon, he sent soldiers against the land wall. They got inside the city before the Chernagors realized they were in trouble. After that, Calydon fell in short order. His biggest trouble then was keeping the inhabitants from massacring the Chernagors he'd taken prisoner.

When he heard some of the stories about what the Chernagors did while holding Calydon, he was more than halfway sorry he hadn't let the people do what they wanted. By then, he'd sent the captured pirates back into the countryside under guard. He didn't know just what he would do with them—put them to work in the mines, maybe, or exchange them for Avornans their countrymen had taken.
And if I don't do either of those,
he thought,
I can always give them back to the people of Calydon.

As his river galleys and soldiers headed east again, he asked Hirundo, “Did you expect anything like what we saw there?”

“Not me, your Majesty.” Hirundo shook his head, then looked as though he wished he hadn't; any motion might be enough to make him queasy while he paced the deck of a river galley. After a gulp, he went on, “They fought us clean enough in their own country last year. Hard, yes, but clean enough. Not like … that.”

“No, not like that,” Grus agreed. “They might as well have been Menteshe, slaughtering the wounded and killing men who tried to yield. And what they did to the people in Calydon was ten times worse.” Over by the rail, Pterocles stirred. The king waved to the wizard. “You have something to say?”

“I'm … not sure, Your Majesty,” Pterocles replied. Grus hoped he hid his frown. Pterocles wasn't sure of much of anything these days. To be fair, he also wasn't the best of sailors, though he was better than Hirundo. Like the general, he paused to gather himself before continuing, “I'm not as surprised as you are, I don't think.”

“Oh? Why not?” Grus asked.

The wizard looked not north, not east, but to the south. In the hollow tones that had become usual since his double overthrow in the land of the Chernagors, he said, “Why not? Because they've had a year longer now to listen to the Banished One, to let him into their hearts.”

“Oh,” Grus said again, this time on a falling note. Pterocles made more sense than the king wished he did. The wizard didn't seem to care whether he made sense or not. Somehow, that made him seem more convincing, not less.

Grus hoped the fleet was still outrunning the news of its coming. If he could get to the sea before the Chernagors along the coast heard he was there, he would have a better chance against them. On the Granicus and, he believed, the rest of the Nine Rivers, his galleys had the advantage over the Chernagors' sailing ships. They were both faster and more agile. Whether that would hold true on the wide waters of the sea was liable to be a different question.

The Granicus, a clear, swift-flowing stream, carried little silt and had no delta to speak of. One moment, or so it seemed to Grus, the river flowed along as it always had. The next, the horizon ahead widened out to infinity. The Azanian Sea awed him even more than the Northern Sea had. That probably had nothing to do with the sea itself. In the Chernagor country, the weather had been cloudy and hazy, which limited the seascape. Here, he really felt as though he could see forever.

But seeing forever didn't really matter. On the north bank of the Granicus, the town of Dodona sat by the edge of the sea. It lay in Chernagor hands. The fresh smoke stains darkening the wall around the town said the corsairs had burned it when they took it.

Several Chernagor ships were tied up at the wharves. The pirates didn't seem to expect trouble. Grus could tell exactly when they spied his fleet. Suddenly, Dodona began stirring like an aroused anthill.
Too late,
he thought, and gave his orders. “We'll hit 'em hard and fast,” he declared. “It doesn't look like it'll be even as tough as Calydon. If it is, we'll try the same trick we used there—feint at the harbor and then go in on the land side. But whatever we do, we have to keep those ships from getting away and warning the rest of the Chernagors.”

Almost everything went the way he'd hoped. Some of the pirates fought bravely as individuals. He'd seen in the north and here in Avornis that they were no cowards. But in Dodona they had no time to mount a coordinated defense. Like ice when warm water hits it, they broke up into fragments and were swept away.

Several of their ships burned by the piers. Avornan marines and soldiers swarmed onto others. But the Chernagors got a crew into one, hoisted sail, and fled northward propelled by a strong breeze from out of the south. That was when Grus really saw what the great spread of canvas they used could do. He sent two river galleys after the Chernagor ship. The men rowed their hearts out, but the pirate ship still pulled away. Grus cursed when it escaped. The Granicus might be cleared of Chernagors, but now all the men from the north would know he was hunting them.

“No, thank you,” Lanius said. “I don't feel like hunting today.”

Arch-Hallow Anser looked surprised and disappointed. “But didn't you enjoy yourself the last time we went out?” he asked plaintively.

“I enjoyed the company—I always enjoy your company,” Lanius said. “And I liked the venison. The hunt itself? I'm very sorry, but …” He shook his head. “Not to my taste.”

“We should have flushed a boar, or a bear,” Anser said. “Then you'd have seen some real excitement.”

“I don't much care for excitement.” Lanius marveled at how the arch-hallow had so completely misunderstood him. “I just don't see the fun of tramping through the woods looking for animals to slaughter. If you do, go right ahead.”

“I do. I will. I'm sorry you don't, Your Majesty.” Hurt still on his face, Anser strode down the palace hallway.

Oh, dear,
Lanius thought. He almost called after Anser, telling him he'd come along after all. He was willing to pay nearly any price to keep Anser happy with him. But the key word there was
nearly.
Going hunting again flew over the limit.

Instead, he went to the moncats' room, where he had an easel set up. He'd discovered a certain small talent for painting the last few years, and he knew more about moncats than anyone else in Avornis.
Than anyone who doesn't live on the islands they come from,
he thought, and wondered how many people lived on those islands out in the Northern Sea. That was something he'd never know.

What he did know was that Petrosus, Grus' treasury minister, was slow and stingy with the silver he doled out. No doubt that was partly at Grus' order, to help keep Lanius from accumulating power to threaten the other king. But Petrosus, whatever his reasons, enjoyed what he did. Lanius had sold several of the pictures of moncats he'd painted. As far as he knew, no King of Avornis had ever done anything like that before. He felt a modest pride at being the first.