The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  Grus knew he would have to be content with that. A weak stomach could prove stronger than good intentions. That thought made the king wonder how Pterocles was taking the journey. As far as Grus knew, the wizard hadn’t traveled far on the Nine Rivers.

  Pterocles stood near the port rail. He wasn’t hanging on to it, and he didn’t seem especially uncomfortable. As he looked out at the fields and apple and pear orchards sliding by, the expression on his face was more … distant than anything else. King Grus nodded to himself. That was the word, all right. Pterocles had never quite been himself after the Chernagor wizard—or had it been the Banished One himself?—struck him down outside of Nishevatz. Something was missing … from his spirit? From his will? Grus had a hard time pinpointing where the trouble lay, but he feared it was serious.

  Prince Vsevolod had stayed behind in the city of Avornis. Nothing he could say would be likely to make the Chernagor pirates change their minds. Grus didn’t miss him. Lanius likes being king, he thought. Let him put up with Vsevolod. That’ll teach him.

  Before long, groves of olives and almonds would replace the fruit trees that grew here. The fleet wasn’t very far south or east of the capital; they’d just emerged from the confusing tangle of streams in the Maze the day before. Down farther south, farmers would grow only wheat and barley; rye and oats would disappear. Before long, though, vineyards would take the place of some of the grainfields.

  The Granicus ran down toward the Azanian Sea through the middle of a wide, broad valley. The hills to the north and south were low and weathered, so low they hardly deserved the name. But smaller streams flowed into the Granicus from those hills to either side. Beyond the watersheds, the streams ran into neighbors from among the Nine Rivers.

  I sent Alca to a riverside town, Grus thought, and hoped none of the pirates had come to Pelagonia. This was the first time he’d come to the south himself since sending her away from the capital. But Pelagonia did not lie along the Granicus, and the king had other things on his mind besides the witch he’d once loved—still loved, though he hadn’t let himself think that while he was anywhere near Estrilda.

  As day followed day and Grus’ fleet sped down the Granicus, he spent more and more time peering ahead, looking for smoke to warn him he was drawing near the Chernagors. Once he saw some rising into the air, but it proved only a grass fire in a field. It might have been a catastrophe for the farmer the field belonged to. To Grus, it was just a distraction.

  And then, a day later, lookouts—and, very soon, Grus himself—spied another black column of smoke. Grus had a good idea of where they were along the Granicus, though he hadn’t traveled the river for several years. To make sure, he asked the steersman, “That’s Araxus up ahead, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” The man at the steering oar nodded. “When we round this next bend in the river, we’ll be able to see the place.”

  He proved not quite right. When they rounded the bend, all they could see was the smoke spilling out from the gutted town. Of Araxus itself there was no sign. But Grus pointed to the ships tied up at the quays. “No one in Avornis ever built those.”

  “How can you tell, Your Majesty?” Hirundo asked.

  Grus gaped. His general was a lubber, and no more a judge of ships than Grus was of horseflesh. “By looking,” the king answered. “They’re bigger and beamier than anything we build, and see those masts?”

  “They’re ships,” Hirundo said.

  “Yes, and we’re going to sink them.” Grus turned to the oarmaster. “Step up the stroke. Let’s hurry.” As the man nodded and got the rowers working harder, Grus told the trumpeter, “Signal the rest of the fleet to up the stroke, too. We don’t want to waste any time.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” The man raised the trumpet to his lips and sent the signal to the other ships close by. Their trumpets passed it along to the rest of the fleet.

  The Chernagors ravaging Araxus were alert. They spotted the Avornan fleet as soon as it rounded the bend in the river. Grus couldn’t see the pirates in the town itself, but he saw them when they came out and ran for their ships. He wondered what they would do once they had them manned. The wind blew out of the east, from the direction of the sea. That had let them sail up the Granicus to Araxus. But the only way they could flee down the river, away from the galleys, was by drifting with the current. If they tried that, the oar-powered Avornan ships would catch them in short order.

  Grus wondered what he would have done if caught in a like predicament. No sooner had the thought, Make the best fight I could, crossed his mind than the Chernagor ships put on their full spread of sail—a stunning spread, by Avornan standards—and started up the Granicus toward the river galleys.

  “Now I see it. They are bigger than we are.” Hirundo sounded nervous. “Can we beat them?”

  “If we can’t, we’d have done better to stay back in the city of Avornis, don’t you think?” Grus asked. Hirundo grinned. Grus knew he had to seem confident. In truth, he had no idea what would happen next. How long had it been since the Chernagors and Avornans squared off against each other on the water? He had no idea. Lanius had tried to tell him, but he hadn’t let the other king finish.

  He wished things happened quicker aboard ship, but no help for that. The Chernagor pirates had to claw their way upstream against the current. More than a quarter of an hour passed between their weighing anchor and the first arrows splashing into the Granicus. The pirates had only half a dozen ships, but they were all jammed full of men. And with their high freeboard, getting Avornan warriors into them from the lower galleys wouldn’t have been easy even if they hadn’t been.

  “Ram the bastards!” Grus shouted. Without his giving the order to the trumpeter, the man sent it on—cleansed of the curse by his mellow notes—to the rest of the fleet. To his own crew, Grus called, “’Ware boarders! If we stick fast when we ram, they’ll swarm down onto us.”

  More and more arrows flew from the pirate ships. Grus had never had to worry about so many in a river battle; he might almost have been fighting on land. A couple of rowers were hit. That fouled the stroke. The oarmaster screamed curses until the wounded men were dragged from their benches and replaced. Archers at the bows of the river galleys were shooting along with the Chernagors, emptying their quivers as fast as they could. A pirate threw up his hands and splashed into the Granicus, an arrow through his throat.

  The oarmaster upped the stroke again, this time without waiting for a command from Grus. The steersman aimed the bronze-tipped ram at the planking just to port of the bow of a pirate ship. Where everything had seemed to move slowly before, all at once the pirate ship swelled enormously.

  “Brace yourselves!” Grus shouted just before the collision.

  Crunch! The ram bit. Grus staggered but kept his feet. “Back oars!” the oarmaster screamed. The rowers did, with all the strength they had in them. If the ram did stick fast in the pirate’s timbers, the Chernagors would board and slaughter them.

  “Olor be praised!” Grus gasped when the river galley pulled free. The pointed ram had torn a hole two feet wide in the pirate ship, just below the waterline. The Granicus flooded in. The extra weight, growing every moment, slowed the ship to a crawl.

  “Ram ’em again, sir?” the steersman asked.

  Grus shook his head. “No. We got enough of what we needed.” He would have done far more damage striking another river galley. The Chernagor ships, built to withstand long voyages and pounding ocean waves, were even more strongly made than he’d expected.

  He looked around to see how the rest of the fight was going. One pirate ship had ridden up and over the luckless river galley that tried to ram it. Avornans, some clutching oars, splashed in the Granicus. Another Chernagor ship traded archery with three river galleys. Two more pirate ships besides the one Grus had struck had been rammed, and were taking on Water. One pirate ship was afire. A river galley burned, too—the Chernagors had flung jars of oil lit with wicks down onto its deck. More
Avornans went into the river. So did Chernagors from the northerners’ burning ship. Grus wondered whether they’d set themselves ablaze. Savagely, he hoped so.

  He pointed to the ship that had defeated one ramming attempt. “Turn about!” he called to the steersman. “We’ll get ’em in the rear.”

  “Right!” The steersman threw back his head and laughed. “Just what they deserve, too, Your Majesty.”

  How the Chernagors on the pirate ship howled as the sharp-beaked river galley sped toward its stern! They sent a blizzard of arrows at Grus, who wished he wore something less conspicuous. He wanted to go below, but that would have made him look like a coward in front of his men. The things we do for pride, he thought as an arrow stood thrilling in the river galley’s deck a few inches in front of his boot.

  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 t
hen 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.”