The Bastard King

by Harry Turtledove

  “I know,” Grus said, “but you wouldn’t be so angry at me if you didn’t still care at least a little.”

  Estrilda was silent for a long time. At last, she sighed. “We’ve been together since before we really finished growing up. How can I help but care? If you think that makes me want to let you touch me now, though, you’d better think again.”

  “Did I say anything about that?”

  “No, and you’d better not,” Estrilda told him. “The answer is still no.”

  “You might want to wait till somebody asks the question before you give the answer,” Grus said.

  “I might, and then again, I might not,” Estrilda said. “Some people, seems to me, need a head start when it comes to getting things straight. And I don’t mean getting that thing straight. That’s what got you into trouble.”

  “Yes, I know.” Grus could hardly disagree with that. “It doesn’t happen very often, Estrilda. It’s been years.” He knew he was pleading. He couldn’t help it.

  “How can I believe that? How can I be sure of it?” Estrilda asked. “Before, I thought, yes, all right, it happened. Anything can happen once. The world doesn’t end with once. Now … How can I trust you now? I can’t.”

  “I am sorry,” Grus said.

  “You’re sorry you got caught. We’ve been over that ground before, too.” Estrilda poked at the earrings with a forefinger. “And all this jewelry is very pretty, but I know why you bought it. You bought it to butter me up.”

  “I bought it to show you I’m sorry. By the gods, Estrilda, I’m not perfect, but I do love you.” Grus took a deep breath, then rolled the dice by asking, “Would I have listened to you when you asked me to send Alca away if I didn’t?”

  “I didn’t ask you to send her away. I told you to send her away.” But his wife hesitated once more. Then she added, “I should say you’re not perfect.”

  “I already said I wasn’t,” Grus said. “Every once in a while … these things happen. Most of the time, they don’t. And I think you know that’s true.”

  Estrilda hesitated again. At last, as grudgingly as she could, she said, “Maybe.”

  That was as much as she’d yielded since finding out about Grus’ affair. He tried for more. “Maybe we can patch things up again, then. We’ve been together for a long time, after all. You said so yourself. If we can’t put up with each other—”

  “I can put up with you,” Estrilda said. “These other women?” She shook her head.

  Grus said, “I’ve done everything I know how to do to make you forgive me. Have I got any chance at all?”

  Estrilda turned her back. After a long, long silence, she said, even more grudgingly than before, “Maybe.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Lanius found himself with a pleasant problem—the moncats were having more kittens than he had good names for them. Not only that, keeping track of which moncat owned which name taxed even his formidable memory. He was almost glad the monkeys were unlikely to breed. He would have had to come up with more names yet.

  Bronze’s belly bulged with what would be two more kittens before much longer. Lanius wasn’t sure which younger moncat had sired them. He hoped it was the one he’d named Rusty, a beast even redder than the reddest red tabby. Rusty resembled neither Bronze nor Iron very much; Lanius wondered from which of them, and how, he’d inherited his looks. They had to come down from one of the original pair of moncats or the other—that much, at least, seemed clear.

  Rusty, at the moment, seemed to be doing his best to kill himself, swinging about on boards and sticks with what in a human would have been reckless disregard for his life. Even the monkeys might not have been able to match his acrobatics, for he had claws to help him hold on and they didn’t. Lanius took out a piece of meat and clucked to him. He had different noises to tell each moncat when a treat was for it—one more thing their burgeoning population threatened to disrupt.

  Another moncat, a brownish female, tried to steal the tidbit. “Not for you!” Lanius said, and jerked the meat away. The female gave him a hard look. He was convinced moncats thought and remembered better than ordinary cats. Maybe they were even more clever than his monkeys. He wondered about that, but hadn’t found a way to test it.

  Down dropped Rusty, fast enough to raise Lanius’ hackles. As soon as the moncat came to the floor, it hurried over to Lanius and started trying to climb him. He gave Rusty the piece of meat. The moncat crouched at his feet while it ate. Rusty knew Lanius wouldn’t let any of the other animals steal its meat. That made the King of Avornis deserve a little extra affection in the moncat’s eyes.

  As Lanius often did, he bent down to stroke Rusty. He tried to tame the moncats as much as he could. The Chernagors had warned him the beasts were less affectionate than ordinary cats—a depressing thought if ever there was one—and the sea-rovers hadn’t been joking. Every so often, though, a moncat would decide to act like a pet instead of a wild animal.

  This was one of those lucky moments. Rusty—again, probably happier than usual because of the treat it had just enjoyed—not only purred but also rolled over and over like a lovable pussycat encouraging its owner to pet it. Rusty even let Lanius rub his stomach, though it and the other moncats usually scratched and bit when the king took such a liberty.

  Emboldened, Lanius squatted. He picked Rusty up and put it in his lap. To his delight, the moncat let him get away with that. In fact, Rusty purred louder than ever. Lanius beamed. He hadn’t imagined a moncat could act so lovable.

  Rusty purred so loud, the King of Avornis didn’t notice the knocking on the door for some little while. Even after noticing, he did his best to ignore it. He wanted that moment to last forever. But the knocking went on and on.

  “Yes? What is it?” Lanius said when he couldn’t ignore it anymore. If some stupid servant was having conniptions about something unimportant, he intended to cut off the fellow’s ears and feed them to the moncats.

  The door opened. That made Lanius think it was Grus—the servants knew better. Even as Lanius muttered a curse, his hand kept stroking Rusty. The moncat kept purring.

  It wasn’t Grus. It wasn’t any of the servants Lanius recognized, either. After a moment, though, he realized he did recognize the man, even if not as a servant. The fellow was one of the thralls Grus and Alca had brought back from Cumanus.

  Lanius marveled that he did know him for who—for what—he was. Thralls’ faces usually bore the blank stares that could as easily have belonged to barnyard animals. Not here. Not now. Purpose informed this man’s features. His eyes glittered as he stared straight at Lanius. The long, sharp knife he held in his right hand glittered, too.

  Still eyeing Lanius, the thrall strode into the moncats’ room. The animals gaped at him. They weren’t used to seeing anybody but the king. The thrall took another slow, deliberate step. Lanius thought he saw the Banished One peering out through the man’s eyes.

  He’s come to kill me, the king thought without undue surprise and—he was surprised about this—without undue fear. He wondered whether by that he he meant the thrall or the Banished One, who impelled the fellow forward as surely as a merely mortal puppeteer worked his puppet’s strings.

  Rusty let out a small, questioning mew. Lanius kept hold of the moncat. He came to his feet and took a step back, toward the far wall of the room. Smiling, raising the knife, the thrall came after him.

  I’m going to die here, Lanius thought. He didn’t know how the thrall had gotten out of the room where Alca had studied him and his fellows—and where they’d stayed, largely ignored, after she left the city of Avornis. How didn’t seem to matter at the moment. He was out, and he had a knife, and, smiling, he took another purposeful step toward the king.

  Only later did Lanius decide the thrall—and, through him, the Banished One—wanted to watch and savor his fear. Just then, no such elaborate thoughts filled his mind.

  He threw Rusty in the thrall’s face.

  The moncat squalled with fury,
and with fear of its own. Up till a moment ago Lanius had been friendly, even loving, and Rusty had returned those feelings as well as an animal could. And now this!

  Rusty clung with all four clawed hands—and with tail, as well. The thrall let out a gurgling shriek of pain, surprise, and fury of his own (or of his Master). He grabbed for the moncat to try to tear it loose. Rusty sank needle-sharp teeth into his hand. The thrall shrieked again.

  Having had one good idea, Lanius got another one. He fled. Dodging the thrall was no problem. Not even with some part of the Banished One’s spirit guiding him could the thrall commit murder with a frenzied, clawing moncat clinging to his head.

  Other moncats had already escaped from the chamber. That was one more thing Lanius knew he would have to worry about later. Meanwhile, he burst out into the corridor, crying, “Guards! Guards! An assassination!” He wished the crucial word weren’t five syllables long; it took forever to say.

  Ordinary servants started shouting, too. Out came the thrall. He’d finally gotten rid of Rusty, but his face looked as though he’d run full speed through a thousand miles of thorn bushes. His left hand bled, too. He kept shaking his head to keep blood from running into his eyes.

  Guards pounded up the hallway. “Seize that man!” Lanius shouted. “Take him alive for questioning if you can.”

  Without a word, the guards rushed at the thrall. He tried to rush at Lanius. Restraining him didn’t work. He fought so fiercely, he made them kill him. Lanius cared much less than he’d thought he would. Staring down at the pool of blood spreading across the mosaicwork floor, all he said was, “I hope that was the only mischief afoot here.”

  A woman’s scream rang down the corridor.

  A servant said, “You do remember, Your Majesty, that you were going to lunch with Her Majesty?”

  “Yes, I remember.” Grus didn’t look up from the pile of parchments he was wading through.

  “You should have gone some little while ago,” the servant said.

  “I suppose I should,” Grus admitted. But he and Estrilda were still so fragile together, even going through petitions for tax relief seemed preferable to eating with her. Still, if he didn’t go at all, he’d insult her, and that would only make things between them worse—if they could be worse.

  Shaking his head, he rose and went up the hall toward the chambers he still shared with his wife, though much less intimately than he had in the past. “Oh, Your Majesty, aren’t you dining with the queen?” asked a servant coming the other way. “A rather strange-seeming fellow was asking after you, and I sent him in that direction.”

  “Strange-seeming?” Grus frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “He sounded like a soldier, though he didn’t quite look like one,” the man answered. “He looked like … I don’t know what. A soldier down on his luck, maybe. But he spoke like a lord.”

  “A soldier down on his luck? What would a soldier down on his luck be doing in …?” Grus started again. “You know, now that I think of it, we put those thralls we brought up from Cumanus in old soldiers’ clothes, didn’t we?” He pointed at the servant. “When did you see this fellow?”

  “Why, just now, Your Majesty,” the man answered. “But a thrall wouldn’t be able to speak, would he?”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Grus said. “Not unless—”

  Estrilda screamed.

  Grus yanked his sword from the scabbard and started to run. The servant pounded after him, though the most obviously lethal thing the man had on his person was a large, shiny brass belt buckle. I’ll have to remember that, Grus thought. Then Estrilda screamed again, and he stopped thinking about anything but getting to her as fast as he could.

  A door slammed. An instant later, a body thudded against it, once, twice, three times. That noise helped guide Grus better than the screams had. So did the sound of the door giving way.

  He dashed into the small dining room where he and Estrilda should have been eating. The man who’d just forced the door to the adjoining pantry whirled. A long kitchen knife gleamed in his hand. “Here you are!” he said, and lunged toward Grus.

  He was a thrall. Grus recognized him, and the old clothes he wore. But his face didn’t hold its usual blank look. Hatred blazed from his eyes. If that wasn’t the Banished One staring out through them, Grus couldn’t imagine ever seeing Avornis’ foe face-to-face.

  The thrall thrust at him. Grus beat the stroke aside. A long kitchen knife made a fine murder weapon when the victim couldn’t fight back. Against a proper sword, it wasn’t so much. The thrall tried to stab Grus again. This time, Grus knocked the knife flying. The thrall threw himself at the king bare-handed.

  Grus’ sword stroke almost separated the man’s head from his shoulders. He cursed himself a moment later; he might have been able to wring answers from the would-be assassin. He’d get no answers now. Blood gouted from the thrall. He staggered, still glaring furiously at Grus, and then slowly crumpled to the floor.

  Estrilda came out of the little pantry where she’d fled. Her face was white as milk. She looked at the twitching, bleeding corpse and gulped. She seldom got reminded of the sorts of things Grus had done for a living before he donned the crown.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  His wife nodded. “He didn’t get a chance to do anything to me,” she said, her voice shaky.

  Stooping, Grus wiped the sword on the dead thrall’s shirt, and jammed it back into the scabbard. Then he went over and took Estrilda in his arms. She clutched him, started to pull away as she remembered she was angry at him, and then seemed to decide this wasn’t the right time for that and clutched him after all.

  More servants came running up in the wake of the one who’d followed Grus. So did royal bodyguards. Grus jerked a thumb at the thrall’s body. “Get that carrion out of here and clean up this mess,” he said. “And, by the gods, make sure King Lanius and the rest of my family are all right.”

  People started leaving as fast as they’d come, and bumped into others coming to see what was happening after it had already happened. Estrilda pointed to a pair of guards. “You men stay,” she said. “More of these devils may be loose.”

  She was right. Grus knew as much. So did the bowing bodyguards. “Yes, Your Majesty,” they chorused.

  When Grus started to put an arm around his wife again, she did slip away. Her eyes stayed on the dead thrall as a servant dragged the body out by the feet. “You should have let him kill me,” she murmured.

  “What?” Grus wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “What are you talking about?” Before Estrilda could answer, more guards clattered up, their chain-mail shirts jingling. Grus said, “You men—go to the thralls’ chamber. You know where that is?” They nodded. “Good,” he told them. “See how many are left there, and don’t let any more out no matter what.” They hurried away. He turned back to Estrilda. “Now what nonsense were you spouting?”

  “It isn’t nonsense. You should have let him kill me,” Estrilda said. “Then you could call your witch back here, and you’d be happy.”

  Grus stared at her. “Has anyone ever told you you were an idiot?” he asked, his voice harsh. Numbly, she shook her head. He said, “Well, everybody missed a perfect chance, then, because you are. By the gods, Estrilda, I love you. I always have.”

  “Even when you were with Alca?” she demanded.

  “Yes, curse it,” Grus said, more or less truthfully. “I never stopped loving you. It was just … she was there, and we were working together, and …” He shrugged. “One of those things.”

  Perhaps luckily, a bodyguard chose that moment to announce, “King Lanius is safe, Your Majesty. A thrall did come after him, but he got away when he flung a moncat in the son of a whore’s face.”

  “Did he?” Grus said, blinking. “Well, good for him. That’s quick thinking.” Another guard came in to report that only two thralls were missing, while the rest seemed as passive and animal-like as ever. Grus nodded. “Glad to hear it.” But he
also had other things on his mind. He turned back to Estrilda. “Will you listen to me, please?”

  “It’s hard to listen to what you say when I know what you did,” she answered. “But I just saw you save me, and so …” She gnawed at the inside of her lower lip. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “You know I’m not perfect,” Grus said. “But I do try. Could you … try to think I’m … not quite so bad?” He’d wanted to come out with something ringing. That wasn’t it. He had to hope it would do.

  Estrilda wasn’t looking at him. She was still eyeing the pool and trail of blood the thrall had left behind. Slowly—very slowly—she nodded. “I’ll try.”

  Together, Lanius and Grus eyed the door to the palace chamber that had held the thralls—that still did hold all but two of them. The door was now closed, the bar on the outside back in place. The thralls in there couldn’t get outside. Of course, the two murderous thralls who had been in there shouldn’t have been able to get outside, either. They shouldn’t have been able to, but they had.

  Lanius eyed the guards who’d stood in front of the door when the thralls escaped. The guards looked back, a sort of wooden embarrassment on their faces. “But couldn’t you hear the bar was coming out of the bracket?” Lanius asked them.

  In identical rhythms, they shook their heads. “No, Your Majesty,” one of them said.

  “Everything looked fine to us,” the other added.

  “You didn’t notice the two thralls sneaking past you?” Grus demanded.

  The royal bodyguards shook their heads. “No, Your Majesty,” one said.

  “We didn’t see anything funny,” the other agreed.

  “I believe them,” Lanius said.

  “So do I, worse luck,” Grus said. Now he shook his head, in the manner of a man disgusted with himself. “This whole sorry mess is my fault.”

  “Your fault?” Lanius said in surprise. “How?”

  “I should have had a wizard keeping guard on the thralls all the time,” Grus answered. “I should have, but I didn’t. After Alca … left the capital, I just let that go. I didn’t have a wizard I particularly trusted—I still don’t—and the thralls seemed harmless, so I thought a couple of ordinary soldiers and a door barred on the outside would keep them out of mischief. I turned out to be wrong.”