The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  “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.

  He watched the moncats scramble and climb, looking for a moment he could sketch in charcoal and then work up into a real painting. When he’d first started painting the animals, he’d tried to get them to pose. He’d even succeeded once or twice, by making them take a particular position to get bits of food. But, as with any cats, getting moncats to do what he wanted usually proved more trouble than it was worth. These days, he let the moncats do what they wanted and tried to capture that on canvas.

  A moncat leaped. His hand leaped, too. There was the moment. He’d known it without conscious thought. His hand was often smarter than his brain in this business. He sketched rapidly, letting that hand do what it would. His stick of charcoal scratched over the canvas.

  When he finished the sketch, he stepped back from it, took a good look—and shook his head. This wasn’t worth working up. Every so often, his leaping hand betrayed him. If I’d really been taught this sketching business, I’d do better.

  He laughed. Several moncats sent him wide-eyed, curious stares. If the sketch had looked as though it was pretty good, Bubulcus or some other servant would have knocked on the door in the middle of it, and it never would have been the same afterwards. That had happened, too.

  Before long, he tried another sketch. This one turned out better—not great, but better. He concentrated hard, working to make the drawing show some tiny fraction of a climbing moncat’s fluidity. He was never happier than when he concentrated hard. Maybe that was why he enjoyed both the painting and his sorties into the archives.

  Both painting and archive-crawling would have made Anser yawn until the top of his head fell off. Put him in the woods stalking a deer, though, and he concentrated as hard as anyone—and he was happy then (unless he missed his shot, of course).

  For a moment, Lanius thought he’d stumbled onto something important. But then he realized he’d just rephrased the question. Why did old parchments make him concentrate, while the arch-hallow needed to try not to crunch a dry leaf under his foot? Lanius still didn’t know.

  He worked hard turning the sketch into a finished painting, too. He always put extra effort into getting the texture of the moncats’ fur right. He’d had some special brushes made, only a few bristles wide. They let him suggest the countless number of fine hairs of slightly different colors that went into the pelts. The real difficulty, though, didn’t lie in the brushes. The real difficulty lay in his own right hand, and he knew it. If he’d had more skill and more training, he could have come closer to portraying the moncats as they really were.

  Every so often, one of the animals would come over and sit close by him while he painted. The moncats never paid any attention to the work on his easel; they did sometimes try to steal his brushes or his little pots of paint. Maybe the linseed oil that held the pigments smelled intriguing. Or maybe it was the odor of the bristles. Then again, maybe the moncats were just nuisances. When one of them made a getaway to the very top of the room with a brush, Lanius was inclined to believe it. After gnawing at the handle of the brush, the moncat got bored with it and let it drop. Lanius scooped it up before another animal could steal it.

  He was carrying the finished painting down the hall when a maidservant coming the other way stopped to admire it. “So that’s what your pets look like, Your Majesty,” she said.

  “Yes, that’s right, Cristata,” he answered.

&nbs
p; “That’s very good work,” she went on, looking closer. “You can see every little thing about them. Are their back feet really like that, with the funny big toes that look like they can grab things?”

  “They can grab things,” he said. “Moncats are born climbers—and born thieves.” After a moment, he added, “How are you these days?”

  “Fair,” she answered. “He doesn’t bother me anymore, so that’s something.” She didn’t want to name Ortalis, for which Lanius couldn’t blame her. She went on, “The money you and King Grus gave me, that’s nice. I’ve never had money before, except to get by on from day to day. But …” Her pretty face clouded.

  “What’s the matter?” Lanius asked. “Don’t tell me you’re running short already.”

  “Oh, no. It isn’t that. I try hard to be careful,” she said. “It’s just that …” She turned red; Lanius watched—watched with considerable interest—as the flush rose from her neck to her hairline. “I shouldn’t tell you this.”

  “Then don’t,” Lanius said at once.

  “No. If I can’t tell you, who can I tell? You saw … what happened … with my shoulder and my back.” Cristata waited for him to nod before continuing, “Well, there was a fellow, a—oh, never mind what he does here. I liked him, and I thought he liked me. But when he got a look at some of that … he didn’t anymore.” She stared down at the floor.

  “Oh.” Lanius thought, then said. “If that bothered him, you’re probably well rid of him. And besides—”

  Now he was the one who stopped, much more abruptly than Cristata had. He feared he was also the one who turned red. “You’re sweet, Your Majesty,” the serving girl murmured, which meant she knew exactly what he hadn’t said. She went up the hall. He went down it, trying to convince himself nothing had happened, nothing at all.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The ocean was an unfamiliar world for Grus. Up until now, he’d been out upon it only a handful of times. If his river galley and the rest of the fleet sailed much farther, they would go out of sight of land. Avornan coastal traders never did anything like that. Even now, with the horizon still reassuringly jagged off to the west, he worried about making his way back to the mainland.

  He worried about it, yes, but he went on, even though he increasingly had the feeling of being a bug on a plate, just waiting for someone to squash him. He didn’t see that he had much choice. To the Chernagors, the open ocean wasn’t a wasteland, a danger. It was a highway. They’d come all this way from their own country to Avornis to prey on his kingdom. He couldn’t sail back to theirs, not from here. His ships couldn’t carry enough supplies for their rowers or spread enough sail to do without those rowers. He didn’t want to think about how they would handle in a bad storm, either.

  But he could—he hoped he could—convince the pirates that they couldn’t harry his coasts without paying a higher price than they wanted. As far as he knew, his men had cleared them out of all the river valleys where they’d landed. But their ships weren’t like his. They could linger offshore for a long time—exactly how long he wasn’t sure—and strike as they pleased. They could … if he didn’t persuade them that was a bad idea.

  Tall and proud, the Chernagors’ ships bobbed in line ahead, not far out of bowshot. The wind had died to a light breeze, which made the river galleys more agile than the vessels from out of the north. The Chernagors wouldn’t be easy meat, though, not when their ships were crammed with fighting men. If a ramming attempt went wrong, the pirates could swarm aboard a galley and make it pay. They’d proved that in earlier fights.

  Hirundo checked his sword’s edge with his thumb. He nodded to Grus. “Well, Your Majesty,” he said, “This ought to be interesting.” The river galley slid down into a trough. He jerked his hand away from the blade. He’d already cut himself once in a sudden lurch.

  At the bow, the chief of the catapult crew looked back to Grus. “I think we can hit them now, Your Majesty, if we shoot on the uproll.”

  “Go ahead,” Grus told him.

  The crew winched back the dart and let fly. The catapult clacked as it flung the four-foot-long arrow, shaft thick as a man’s finger, toward the closest pirate ship. The dart splashed into the sea just short of its target. The Chernagors jeered.

  “Give them another shot,” Grus told the sailors, who were already loading a fresh dart into the catapult.

  This one thudded into the planking of the Chernagors’ ship. It did no harm, and the Chernagors went right on mocking. One or two of them tried to shoot at Grus’ ship, but their arrows didn’t come close. The catapult could outreach any mere man, no matter how strong.

  Grimly, its crew reloaded once more. This time, when they shot, the great arrow skewered not one but two pirates. One splashed into the sea. The other let out a shriek Grus could hear across a quarter of a mile of water. The catapult crew raised a cheer. The Chernagors stopped laughing.

  “Form line abreast and advance on the foe,” Grus told the officer in charge of signals. The pennants that gave that message fluttered along both sides of the galley. The ships to either side waved green flags to show they understood. The system had sprung to life on the Nine Rivers, and was less than perfect on the ocean. But it worked well enough. Grus saw no signals from the Chernagor ships. When had the pirates last faced anyone able to fight back?

  Catapult darts flew. Every now and then, one would transfix a pirate, or two, or three. Marines at the bows of the river galleys started shooting as soon as they came close enough to the Chernagor ships.

  By then, of course, the Chernagors were close enough to shoot back. Carpenters had rigged shields to give the river galleys’ rowers some protection—that was a lesson the first encounters with the big ships full of archers had driven home. Every so often, though, an arrow struck a rower. Replacements pulled the wounded men from the oars and took their places. The centipede strokes of the galleys’ advance didn’t falter badly.

  Clouds covered the sun. Grus hardly noticed. He was intent on the Chernagor ship at which his ram was aimed like an arrow’s point. The wind also began to rise, and the chop on the sea. Those he did notice, and cursed them both. The wind made the Chernagor ships more mobile, and with their greater freeboard they could deal with worse waves than his galleys.

  “Your Majesty—” Pterocles began.

  Grus waved the wizard to silence. “Not now! Brace yourself, by the—”

  Crunch! The ram bit before he could finish the warning. He staggered. Pterocles fell in a heap. The Chernagor ship had tried to turn away at the last instant, to take a glancing blow or make the river galley miss, but Grus’ steersman, anticipating the move, countered it and made the hit count. “Back oars!” the oarmaster roared. The river galley pulled free. Green seawater flooded into the stricken pirate ship.

  A couple of other Chernagor vessels were rammed as neatly as the one Grus’ galley gored. Not all the encounters went the Avornans’ way, though. Some of the Chernagor captains did manage to evade the river galleys’ rams. The kilted pirates, shooting down into the galleys while they were close, made the Avornans pay for their attacks.

  And one river galley had-rammed, but then could not pull free—every skipper’s nightmare. Shouting Chernagors dropped down onto the galley and battled with the marines and the poorly armed rowers. Grus ordered his own ship toward the locked pair. His marines shot volley after volley at the swarming Chernagors. Pirates and Avornans both went over the side, sometimes in an embrace as deadly as their vessels’.

  Pterocles struggled to his feet. He plucked at Grus’ sleeve. “Your Majesty, this storm—”

  “Storm?” Grus hadn’t realized it was one. But even as he spoke, a raindrop hit him in the face, and then another and another. “What about it? Blew up all of a sudden, that’s for sure.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Your Majesty,” the wizard said. “It’s got magic behind it, magic or … something.”

  “Something?” Grus asked. Pterocles’ expression told
him what the wizard meant—something that had to do with the Banished One. The king said, “What can you do about it? Can you hold it off until we’ve finished giving the Chernagors what they deserve?” As he spoke, another river galley rammed a pirate ship, rammed and pulled free. The Chernagor ship began to sink.

  At the same time, though, a wave crashed up over the bow of Grus’ river galley, splashing water into the hull. The steersman called, “Your Majesty, we can’t take a lot of that, you know.”

  “Yes,” Grus said, and turned back to Pterocles. “What can you do?” he asked again.

  “Not much,” the wizard answered. “No mortal can, not with the weather. That’s why I think it’s … something.”

  “Should we break off, then?” Grus asked doubtfully. “We’re beating them.” First one, then another, Chernagor ship hoisted all sail and sped off to the north at a speed the river galleys, fish in the wrong kind of water, couldn’t hope to match.

  “I can’t tell you what to do, Your Majesty. You’re the king. I’m just a wizard. I can taste the storm, though. I don’t like it,” Pterocles said.

  Grus didn’t like it, either. He didn’t like letting the Chernagors get away, but their ships could take far more weather than his. “Signal Break off the fight,” he shouted to the man in charge of the pennants. Another waved smashed over the bow. That convinced him he was doing the right thing. He added, “Signal Make for shore, too.” In the thickening rain, the pennants drooped. He hoped the other captains would be able to make them out.

  The last Chernagor ships that could escaped. The others, mortally wounded, wallowed in the waves. One had turned turtle. So had a wrecked river galley. Here and there, men splashed by the ruined warships. Some paddled; others clung to whatever they could. The river galleys fished out as many sailors—Avornans and Chernagors—as they could.

  Make for shore. It had seemed an easy enough command. But now, with the storm getting worse, with rain and mist filling the air, Grus was out of sight of land. He and the steersman had to rely on wind and wave to tell them what their eyes couldn’t.