The Chernagor Pirates (68 page)

“Yes, I know that.” The king nodded.

Otus sighed. “I do her wrong when I do this. I understand that. But I am here, and she is there—and she is hardly more than a brute beast. I loved her when I was a beast myself. I might love her if she were a beast no more. Your Majesty, so many thralls down there! Save them!”

Otus' appeal didn't surprise Grus. The power with which the ex-thrall phrased it did. “I'll do what I can,” the king answered. “I don't know how much that will be. It will depend on the civil war among the Menteshe, and on how well wizards besides Pterocles can learn to cure thralls.”

And if they truly can,
he thought. He didn't say that to Otus, who seemed normal enough. If Otus hadn't seemed normal, Grus wouldn't have thought of campaigning south of the Stura at all.

“You could make beasts into men.” If the former thrall wasn't cured, he sounded as though he was. “Who but the gods could ever do that until now? You would be remembered forever.”

Grus laughed. “Are you sure you weren't born a courtier?”

“I'm sure, Your Majesty,” Otus said. “Courtiers tell lies. I'm too stupid to do that. I tell you the truth.”

“I'm going to tell you the truth, too,” Grus said. “I want to fight south of the Stura. I don't know if I can. It's dangerous for Avornan kings to go over the frontier. There have been whole armies that never came back. I want to cure thralls. I don't want to see free men taken down into thralldom.”

“You wouldn't!” Otus exclaimed. “Look at me. I'm free. I'm cured. Whatever the Banished One can do, he can't make me back into what I was.

From what Lanius wrote, Otus had always insisted on that. The trouble was, he would have insisted on it as vehemently if it were a lie as he would have if it were true. Grus didn't know how to judge which it was. He didn't know what to do, either.

“I already told you—I'll decide what to do come spring,” he said after some thought. “If the Menteshe have a prince by then and they're solidly behind him, I may have to sit tight. If they don't … If they don't, well, I'll figure out what to do next then, that's all.”

“You ought to be ready to move, whether you do or not,” Otus remarked.

That held a good deal of truth. “I already have soldiers in the south,” Grus said. “There's one other thing I need to check up on before I make up my mind.”

“What's that?” Otus asked.

Grus didn't answer, not directly. Instead, he chatted for a little while longer and then took his leave. He went to a small audience chamber and told a servant, “Find the serving girl named Calypte and tell her I'd like to talk with her, please.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” The servant dipped his head and hurried off.

Calypte came into the room less than a quarter of an hour later. Until then, Grus couldn't have matched her name with her face. She was in her late twenties, short, a little on the plump side, with a round face, very white teeth, and dark eyes that sparkled. She wore a leaf-green dress and had tied a red kerchief over her black hair and under her chin. Dropping Grus a curtsy, she said, “What is it, Your Majesty?” She sounded nervous. Grus didn't suppose he could blame her. She had to think she was either in trouble or that he was about to try to seduce her.

He said, “You're … friends with Otus, aren't you?”

“Yes, I am.” Now that she knew where the ground lay, her nerves vanished. She stuck out her chin. “Why shouldn't I be?”

A feisty little thing,
Grus thought, and hid a smile. “No reason at all,” he answered. “I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions about him.”

“Why?” Calypte demanded. “What business is it of anybody except him and me?”

“It's also the kingdom's business, I'm afraid,” Grus said. “You haven't forgotten he used to be a thrall, have you?”

“Oh.” The maidservant's face clouded. “If you really want to know, I
had
forgotten until you reminded me. He doesn't act like a thrall—or the way I suppose a thrall would act. He just acts like—a man.” She looked down at the mosaics on the floor and turned pink. Grus got the idea Otus had acted very much like a man earlier in the morning.

This time, he didn't try to hide his smile. He said, “I don't want to know about any of that. It isn't any of my business—you're right. What I want to know is, have you ever seen any places where he doesn't act just like a man, where being a thrall left him different?”

Calypte thought that over. She didn't need long. When she was done, she shook her head. A black curl popped free. Tucking it back under the kerchief, she said, “No, I don't think so. He hasn't been in the palace for years, the way most people I know have, so there are things he doesn't understand right away, but anybody new here is like that.”

“Are you sure?” Grus asked. “It could be more important than you know.”

“I'm not a witch or anything, Your Majesty,” Calypte answered. “I can't cast a spell or do things like that. But from what I know, he's as much of a man as a man could be.”

She was right. Pterocles could make tests she couldn't even imagine. But the wizard would have admitted—
had
admitted—he couldn't be altogether sure of the answers he got, not when he was measuring himself against the strength and subtlety of the Banished One. But the tests Calypte applied (not that she would have called them such) were ones that, by the very nature of things, Pterocles was not equipped to administer.

Grus found himself smiling again. “Fair enough,” he said. “You can go. And the next time you see Otus, you can tell him from me that I think he's a lucky fellow.”

The serving girl smiled, too. “I'll do better than that. I'll show him.” And, by the way her hips swayed when she left the audience chamber, she would do a good, careful, thorough job of showing him, too.

Leaves blazed gold and maroon and scarlet. When the wind blew through the trees, it swirled them off branches and sent them dancing like bits of flame. Lanius admired the autumn. “This is reason to come out to the woods all by itself,” he said.

Arch-Hallow Anser and Prince Ortalis both laughed at the king. “This is pretty enough,” Anser said, “but the reason to come out here is the hunting.”

“That's right,” Ortalis said, not that Lanius had expected him to say anything else. Anser came hunting because he enjoyed it. Ortalis came hunting because he enjoyed hunting, too, but in a different way. Lanius was glad to have Ortalis hunt, because he might do something worse if he didn't.

And you
—
why do you come hunting?
the king wondered. He didn't take pleasure in it, the way Anser did. He didn't need it, crave it, the way Ortalis did. But every so often Anser looked as though he would curl up and die of disappointment if he heard “No” one more time, and Anser was too nice a fellow to disappoint.

Smiling, the arch-hallow said, “Maybe you'll kill something this time.”

“Maybe I will,” Lanius said. “Maybe a stag will die laughing at how badly I shoot.” Anser laughed, whether a stag would or not. Lanius managed a wry smile at his own ineptitude. He wasn't much of a bowman. He knew that. But he also used his bad archery as an excuse not to have to kill anything. He didn't think either Anser or Ortalis had ever figured that out. He hoped not, anyway.

“Think of venison,” Ortalis said lovingly. “Think of a roasted haunch, or of chunks of venison stewed for a nice long time in wine and herbs, until all the gamy taste goes away. Doesn't it make your mouth water?”

Lanius nodded, because it did. He loved eating meat. Killing it himself had always been a different story. He recognized the inconsistency, and had no idea what to do about it.

One of Anser's beaters nodded to the arch-hallow. “We're off,” he said. He and his comrades disappeared into the woods.

“They're better hunters than any of us,” Lanius said.

“I don't know about that,” Ortalis said. Anser didn't look convinced, either. They both enjoyed hunting for its own sake, which Lanius didn't. Ortalis added, “The two of us could come out here without beaters, because we can find game on our own. Some people I could name, though …”

“If that's what's bothering you—” Lanius began.

“What? You think you could do your own stalking?” Ortalis broke in. “Don't make me laugh.” That wasn't what Lanius had started to say. He'd been about to tell Grus' legitimate son and his bastard that he couldn't have cared less about finding game on his own, that he came hunting for the sake of their company (especially Anser's, though he wouldn't have said that) and to get out to the forest and away from the palace. Maybe it was just as well Ortalis had interrupted him.

Something up in a tree chirped. Peering through the branches, Lanius got a glimpse of a plump brown bird with a striped belly. “Thrush,” Anser said without even looking toward it. “They fly south for the winter every year about this time.”

“Do they?” Lanius said. The arch-hallow nodded. Lanius still knew less about birds than he wished he did. He knew less than he wished he did about a lot of things. Not enough hours in the day, not enough days in the year to learn as much as he could about all the things he wanted to know.

“They're tasty baked in a pie,” Ortalis said. Anser nodded again. This time, so did Lanius. Pies and stews full of songbirds were some of his favorite dishes. Again, though, he didn't care to hunt thrushes himself.

A rabbit bounded by and disappeared into the undergrowth. Anser started to set an arrow to his bowstring, then checked the motion and laughed at himself. “Not much point to shooting at rabbits,” he said. “You only waste your arrows that way. If you want rabbits in your stew instead of songbirds, you go after them with dogs and nets.”

“Then you whack them over the head with a club,” Ortalis said. “That way, you don't hurt the pelts.”

“I see,” Lanius said. He wondered what he really saw. What Ortalis said made perfect sense. Did the prince really sound as though he enjoyed the idea of whacking rabbits over the head with a club, or was Lanius only hearing what he expected to hear? The king couldn't be sure, and decided he had to give his brother-in-law the benefit of the doubt.

“Come on,” Anser said. “There's a clearing not far from here. If we post ourselves at the edge of it, we'll get good shots.”

He glided down a game track as smoothly and silently as any of the men who served him, the men who looked so much like poachers. Lanius was sure he could find his own game if he had to. Ortalis did his best to move the same way, but wasn't as good at it. Lanius tried not to trip over his own feet and not to step on too many twigs. Anser winced only once, so he supposed he wasn't doing too bad a job.

The three high-ranking hunters had their usual low-voiced argument about who would shoot first. Lanius resigned himself to looking foolish in front of Grus' sons. He'd done it before.
You could try to kill a deer,
he said to himself, and then shook his head. That wasn't why he came out here.

A frightened stag bounded into the clearing. “Good luck, Your Majesty,” Anser whispered.

“Try to frighten it, anyhow, Your Majesty,” Ortalis whispered—a reasonable estimate of Lanius' talents.

Since the shot was fairly long, the king didn't worry much about taking aim, good, bad, or otherwise. He pointed the bow in the general direction of the stag and let fly. Even as he did so, the stag bounded forward. Anser and Ortalis sighed together. So did Lanius, with something approaching relief. This time, at least, he had a good enough excuse for missing.

If the stag had stood still, the arrow would have flown past in front of it. As things were, the shaft caught the animal just behind the left shoulder. The deer took four or five staggering steps, then fell on its side, kicking feebly. As Lanius stared in dismay, the kicking stopped and the stag lay still.

“Well shot, by Olor's beard!” Anser cried. “Oh, well shot!” Ortalis whooped and pounded Lanius on the back. The king's guards whooped, too.

He'd missed again, but he was the only one who knew it. This time, he'd missed at missing. Lanius gulped. He didn't want to look at the animal he'd just killed.

But his ordeal, evidently, hadn't ended. “Now you get to learn how to butcher the beast,” Ortalis said. “I wondered if you ever would.”

“Butcher it?” Lanius gulped. “That … isn't what I had in mind.” He turned toward Anser for support.

The arch-hallow let him down. “It's part of the job,” Anser said. “You ought to know what to do and how to do it. You don't need to cut its throat; it's plainly dead. That was as clean a kill as the one Ortalis had a while ago.”

“Huzzah,” Lanius said in a hollow voice. Anser and Ortalis clucked in disapproval and dismay when they discovered he had no knife on his belt. They would have sounded the same way if he'd gotten up in the morning and forgotten to put on his breeches. Ortalis drew his own knife and handed it to the king hilt first. He moved slowly and carefully as he did it, mindful of Lanius' bodyguards. The edge of the blade, lovingly honed and polished, glittered in the sunlight.

“Here's what you do,” Anser said. Following his instructions, Lanius did it. He kept his breakfast down, but had no idea how.

“If you want to start a little fire and roast the mountain oysters, they're mighty good eating,” a guard said helpfully. “Same with a chunk of liver when it's all nice and fresh, though it won't keep more than a few hours.”

Lanius knew no more about starting a fire than about butchery. Anser took care of that. The guard skewered the mountain oysters on a stick and roasted them over the flames. When they were done, he handed Lanius the stick. The king wanted to throw it away. But the guardsman waited expectantly, and both Anser and Ortalis seemed to think he'd done Lanius a favor. With a silent sigh, Lanius ate.