The Chernagor Pirates (51 page)

“Oh, yes.” The king nodded. “I'm not going to walk to the woods—I'll tell you that.”

“Let's go, then.”

A couple of hours later, Lanius and the arch-hallow dismounted under the trees. Grooms took charge of the horses. The king, the arch-hallow, and their beaters and guards walked into the woods. “Maybe you'll hit something this time, Your Majesty,” Anser said. “You never can tell.”

“No, you never can,” Lanius agreed in a hollow voice. Hitting a stag with an arrow remained about the last thing he wanted to do.

Birds chirped overhead. Looking up, the king wondered what kind they were. Being able to tell one bird from another when neither was a pigeon or a sparrow would be interesting, but he hadn't gotten good at it yet. Learning to recognize them by their looks and by their songs necessarily involved staying out in the woods until he could. That made it more trouble than it was worth to him.

“Are you sure you want me to take the first shot, Your Majesty?” Anser said. “It's very kind, but you don't need to give me the honor.”

“My pleasure,” Lanius said, which was absolutely true. He went on, “Besides, you're the one who's
liable
to hit something. If I do, it'll just be by accident, and we both know it.”

The beaters fanned out into the woods. Anser's men vanished silently among the trees. Lanius' guards were noisy enough to make the arch-hallow's followers smile. But they did no more than smile. The two groups had tangled after earlier hunts. Lanius' guards came out on top in tavern brawls.

Anser chose a spot oh the edge of a clearing. Before long, a stag bounded out into the open space. The arch-hallow let fly. He cursed more or less good-naturedly when his arrow hissed past the deer's head. The stag sprang away.

“Well, you won't do worse than I did, anyhow,” Anser said to Lanius.

“No,” the king agreed. He'd never had the nerve to tell Anser he always shot to miss. He enjoyed eating venison, but not enough to enjoy killing animals himself so he could have it. He wouldn't have wanted to be a butcher, either. He recognized the inconsistency without worrying about reconciling it.

Half an hour passed with no new game in the clearing. Lanius, who didn't mind, said nothing. Anser, who did, grumbled. Then another stag, smaller and less splendid than the first, trotted out into the open space. It stopped not fifteen yards in front of Lanius and Anser.

“Your shot, Your Majesty,” Anser whispered.

Awkwardly, with unpracticed fingers, Lanius fit an arrow to the bowstring. Here was his dilemma, big as life, for he knew he could hit the stag if he but shot straight. Wouldn't it have an easier death if he shot it than if it died under the ripping fangs of wolves or from some slow, cruel disease?

He drew the bow, let fly … and the arrow zoomed high, well over the stag's back. The animal fled.

“Oh … too bad, Your Majesty,” Anser said, doing his good-natured best not to show how annoyed he was.

“I told you before—I'm hopeless,” Lanius answered. As a matter of fact, he was rather proud of himself.

Out on the Northern Sea, a ship made for Nishevatz, its great spread of sail shining white in the spring sun. On the shore, a tiny ship made from a scrap of wood, a twig, and a rag bobbed in a bowl of seawater. The spring sun shone on it, too. Hundreds of defenders on the walls of Nishevatz anxiously eyed the real ship. King Grus and Pterocles paid more attention to the toy in the bowl.

“Whenever you're ready,” the king said.

“Now is as good a time as any,” Pterocles replied. He held his curved bit of crystal above the toy ship. A brilliant spot of light appeared on the toy. Grus wondered how the crystal did that. He had ever since he first saw this sorcery. Now was
not
the time, though, to ask for an explanation.

Pterocles began a spell—a chant mixed with passes that pointed from the little ship in the bowl to the big one on the sea. On and on he went, until smoke began to rise from the toy ship. More and more smoke came from it, and then it burst into flame. Pterocles cried out commandingly and pointed once more to the tall-masted ship on the Northern Sea.

Grus' eye went that way, too. The ship still lay some distance offshore, but Grus could spot the smoke rising from it. Before long, that smoke turned to flickering red-yellow flame, too. “Well done!” he exclaimed.

A loud groan rose from the walls of Nishevatz. The defenders must have hoped the supply ship would be able to get through, even though they had found no counterspell against Pterocles' charm. If it had, the siege would have become much more difficult. As things were, the Avornans held on to the advantage.

A longtime sailor himself, Grus knew a certain amount of sympathy for the Chernagors aboard that burning ship. Nothing afloat could be a worse horror than fire. That had to be doubly true on the long seagoing voyages the northern men, formidable traders and formidable pirates, often undertook. And these flames, springing from magic as they did, would be all the harder to fight.

The sailors soon gave up trying to fight them. Instead, they went over the side and made for Nishevatz in boats while the ship burned. The boats could not hold all the men. Maybe more clung to lines trailing behind them. Grus hoped so. He wanted to stop the grain the ship carried, but had nothing special against the sailors.

Another Chernagor ship had come up over the horizon while Pterocles was casting his spell. When smoke and flame burst from the vessel nearing Nishevatz, the other ship hastily put about and sailed away from the besieged city-state. Pointing to it, Pterocles asked, “Do you want me to see if I can set that one afire, too, Your Majesty?”

“No,” Grus said. The wizard looked surprised. The king explained, “Let that crew go. They'll spread the word that our magic still works. That will make the rest of the Chernagors not want to come to Nishevatz. I hope it will, anyhow.”

“Ah.” Pterocles nodded. “Yes, now that you point it out to me, I can see how that might be so. If the other ship had kept coming …”

Grus nodded, too. “That's right. If it had kept coming, I would have told you to do your best to sink it. This way, though, better not. Bad news isn't bad news unless someone's left to bring it.”

“I'll be ready in case the Chernagors try again,” the wizard said. “If they come at night, I can use real fire to kindle my symbolic ships. The spell isn't as elegant that way, but it should still work. It did the last time.”

“Working is all I worry about,” Grus said. “I know you sorcerers sweat for elegance, but it doesn't matter a bit to me.”

“It should,” Pterocles said. “The more elegant a spell is, the harder the time wizards on the other side have of picking it to pieces.”

“Really? I didn't know that,” Grus admitted. “Still, though, the Chernagor wizards haven't had any luck trying to cope with this spell. Doesn't that mean they won't be able to no matter what?”

“I wish it did.” Pterocles' smile was distinctly weary. “All it really means, though, is that they haven't figured out how yet. They may work out a counterspell tomorrow. If they do”—he shrugged—“then that means I have to come up with something new. And it means Nishevatz gets fed.”

He was frank. He was, perhaps, more frank than Grus would have liked. After a moment's thought, the king shook his head. Pterocles had told him what he needed to know. “Thank you,” Grus said. “If they do find a counterspell, I know you'll do your best to get around it.”
You'd better do your best. Otherwise, we'll have to try storming the place, and I don't know if we can. I don't want to have to find out, either.

That evening, Prince Vsevolod came up to him and asked him to do exactly that. “Sooner we are in Nishevatz, sooner we punish Vasilko,” Vsevolod boomed.

“Well, yes, Your Highness, if we
get
into Nishevatz,” Grus said. “If the men on the walls throw us back, I don't know if we'll be able to go on with the siege afterwards. That would depend on how bad they hurt us.”

“You do not want to fight,” Vsevolod said in accusing tones.

“I want to win,” Grus said. “If I can win without throwing away a lot of my men, I want that most of all.”

For all Prince Vsevolod followed that, the king might as well have spoken in the language of the Menteshe. Vsevolod said, “You do not want to fight,” again. Then he turned his back and stalked away without giving Grus a chance to reply.

Grus was tempted—sorely tempted—to fling Vsevolod into chains for the insult. With a mournful sigh, he decided he couldn't. It was too likely to cause trouble not only with the Chernagors who'd accompanied the prince to Nishevatz but also with those inside the city. Grus let out a grunt also redolent of regret. No matter what his good sense said, the temptation lingered.

Grus would never have made a poet or a historian, but he did get the essential facts where they belonged. Lanius had come to rely on that. So far, everything seemed to be going as the other king hoped. Experience had taught Lanius not to get too excited about such things. The end of the campaign—if it didn't have to break off in the middle—would be the place to judge.

Other reports came up from the south—reports of the fighting between Sanjar and Korkut. Lanius enjoyed every word of those. Each account of another bloody battle between Prince Ulash's unloving sons made his smile wider. The more the Menteshe hurt one another, the harder the time they would have hurting Avornis.

Before the spring was very old, other news came up from the south, news that the Menteshe to the east and west of what had been Ulash's realm were sweeping in to seize what they could from it. In the same way, ravens and vultures that would never harm a live bear snatched fragments from its carcass once the beast was dead. Again, the more those Menteshe stole, the happier Lanius got.

And what made him more cheerful yet was hearing no news at all from the east. News from that direction, news from the shore of the Azanian Sea, was unlikely to be good. If the Chernagors sent a fleet to harry the coast, cries for help would fly back to the city of Avornis. So far … none.

That left Lanius in an unusually good mood. Even if Sosia had had nothing to do with causing it, she responded to it, and seemed to forgive him for amusing himself with Zenaida. He gratefully accepted that.

But the king's exuberance also made the serving women pay more attention to him than they did when he was his usual sobersided self. “You're so—bouncy, Your Majesty!” exclaimed a plump but pretty maidservant named Flammea.

No one in all of Lanius' life up until that moment had ever called him bouncy—or anything like bouncy. He managed a smile that, if not bouncy, might at least be taken as friendly. Flammea smiled back. Lanius patted her in an experimental way. If she'd ignored him and gone about her business, he would have shrugged and forgotten about her. Instead, she giggled. He took that as a promising sign.

One thing led to another—led quite quickly to another, as a matter of fact. “Oh, Your Majesty!” Flammea gasped, an oddly formal salute at that particular moment. Lanius was too busy to be much inclined to literary criticism.

Afterwards, the maidservant looked smug. Did that mean she was going to brag to all her friends? If she did, she would be sorry. Of course, if she did, Sosia would find out, and then Lanius would be sorry, too.

“Don't worry, Your Majesty,” she said as she got back into her clothes. “I don't blab.”

“Well, good.” Lanius hoped she meant it. If she didn't, he—and Sosia, too—would make her regret it.

Flammea slipped out of the little storeroom where they'd gone. A minute or so later, so did Lanius. Another serving woman—a gray-haired, severely plain serving woman—was coming up the hallway when he did. She gave him a curious look, or possibly a dubious look. He nodded back, as imperturbably as he could, and went on his way. Behind him, the serving woman opened the door to the storeroom. Lanius smiled to himself. She wouldn't learn anything that way.

The king's smile slipped when he wondered what would happen if Flammea found herself pregnant. Grus had coped well enough, but Anser was born long before Grus became king. Lanius laughed at himself. He might be thinking about making a child with Flammea now, but he hadn't worried about it one bit before lying down with her. What man ever did?

Day followed day. Sosia didn't throw any more crockery at his head. From that, he concluded Flammea could indeed keep her mouth shut. She also didn't make a nuisance of herself when they saw each other. They did contrive to go off by themselves again not too long after the first time. Lanius enjoyed that as much as he had earlier on. If Flammea didn't, she pretended well.

“You
are
in a good humor,” Sosia said that evening. “The Menteshe should have civil wars more often. They agree with you.”

Lanius didn't choke on his soup. If that didn't prove something about his powers of restraint, he couldn't imagine what would. “The Menteshe should have civil wars more often,” he agreed gravely. “Avornis would be better off if they did.”

His wife was a queen, the wife of one king and the daughter of another (even if Lanius thought Grus as illegitimate a king as a lot of Avornis had once reckoned him). She said, “How do we
make
the Menteshe fight among themselves?”

“If I knew the answer to that, I'd do it,” Lanius said. “The way things are, I'm happy enough to try to take advantage of it when it happens.” He was also happy Sosia thought his good cheer came from policy. Raising his wine cup, he said, “Here's to more civil war among the Menteshe.”

Sosia drank with him.

Beloyuz came up to Grus as the King of Avornis eyed the walls of Nishevatz early one misty morning. “May I speak to you, Your Majesty?” the Chernagor noble asked.

“If I say no now, you're a man in trouble, for you just did,” Grus answered. Beloyuz stared at him in puzzlement. Grus swallowed a sigh. None of the nobles who followed Prince Vsevolod had much in the way of humor. The king went on, “Say what you will.”