The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  He actually saw his first Menteshe on Avornan soil the next morning. A band of Ulash’s riders had slipped past the Avornan sentries, leaving them none the wiser. By the surprise with which the Menteshe reacted to the sight of the whole Avornan army heading their way, they hadn’t so much eluded the scouts as bypassed them without either side’s noticing.

  Despite the way the Menteshe threw up their hands and shouted in their guttural language, they didn’t wheel their horses and gallop off as fast as they could go. Instead, they rode toward the Avornans, and started shooting at a range Avornan bows couldn’t match.

  Grus had seen that before, too, most recently in his fight with Prince Evren’s nomads. “Forward!” he shouted to the trumpeters, who blew the appropriate horn call. The Avornans pushed their horses up to a gallop as fast as they could. Grus’ own mount thundered forward with the rest. He hoped he could stay aboard the jouncing beast. A fall now wouldn’t be embarrassing. It would be fatal.

  The Menteshe, vastly outnumbered, were not ashamed to flee. Grus had expected nothing else. They kept shooting over their shoulders, too, and shooting very well. But the Avornans were also shooting now, and some of them had faster horses than the nomads did. Whether the Menteshe liked it or not, their pursuers came into range.

  And the Avornans could shoot well, too, even if they didn’t carry double-curved bows reinforced with horn and sinew the way Ulash’s men did. One nomad after another threw up his hands and crumpled to the ground. A horse went down, too, and the beast just behind fell over it and crashed down. Grus hoped both riders got killed.

  The surviving nomads scattered then, galloping wildly in all directions. A few of them might have gotten away, but most didn’t. Grus waved to the trumpeters. They blew the signal to rein in. Little by little, the Avornans slowed. Sides heaving, Grus’ horse bent its head to crop a wisp of grass.

  “Very neat, Your Majesty,” Hirundo called, a grin on his face.

  “Do you mean this little skirmish, or do you mean that I managed to stay on the horse?” Grus inquired.

  Hirundo’s grin got wider. “Whichever you’d rather, of course.”

  “I’m prouder of staying on and even keeping up,” the king said. “This little band of Menteshe was nothing special—beating them was like cracking an egg with a sledgehammer. They’re scattered over the countryside, raiding and looting. Until they come together again, we’ll win some easy victories like this.”

  “We want to win as many of them as we can, too, before they do come together,” his general said. “The more of them we can get rid of that way, the fewer we’ll have to worry about then.”

  “I know. Believe me, I know,” Grus said. “And even if we do hit them hard, they spatter like quicksilver. We won’t always be able to pursue the way we did here, either. If we split up to go after them, they’re liable to jump us instead of the other way around.”

  “Well, Your Majesty, you certainly do understand the problem,” Hirundo said. “Now if you can figure out a way to solve it …”

  Grus grunted and leaned forward to pat the side of his horse’s neck. Avornans had understood the problem ever since the Menteshe boiled up from the south centuries before. The nomads, trained since childhood to ride and to tend their flocks, were simply better horsemen than the Avornans. Not only did they carry more powerful bows, but they could also cover more ground. If Avornis hadn’t had the advantage of numbers … Grus didn’t care to think about what might have happened then.

  Forcing himself to look on the bright side instead, Grus said, “Well, we solved it here, anyhow.”

  “So we did.” Hirundo nodded. “How many more times will we have to solve it, though, before we finally drive the Menteshe back over the Stura?”

  “I don’t know,” Grus answered with a sigh. He didn’t even know yet whether the Avornans could drive Prince Ulash’s men back over the river this year. That was something else he preferred not to think about. With another sigh, he went on, “The other question is, how much damage will they do before we can throw them out? They haven’t mounted an invasion like this for years.”

  “Yes, and we both know why, or think we do,” Hirundo said. The response made the king no happier. Up until recently, Ulash had seemed both reasonable and peaceable, qualities Grus wasn’t in the habit of associating with the Menteshe. But he and his folk reverenced the Banished One—the Fallen Star, they called him. If he told Ulash to cause trouble for Avornis, Ulash would—Ulash had—no matter how reasonable and peaceable he’d seemed for many years.

  “I wonder …” Grus said slowly.

  “What’s that, Your Majesty?” Hirundo asked.

  “I wonder if we can do anything to persuade Ulash he’d be better off worshiping the gods in the heavens than the Banished One.”

  “I doubt it.” Hirundo, a practical man, sounded like one. “If the Menteshe haven’t figured out who the true gods are yet, we can’t teach ’em.”

  He was probably right, no matter how much Grus wished he were wrong. But things were more complicated than Hirundo realized. King Olor and Queen Quelea and the rest were undoubtedly the gods in the heavens. That made them stronger than the Banished One, yes. Whether it made him any less a true god … was yet another thing Grus would sooner not have contemplated.

  That evening, drums boomed in the distance. Grus knew what that meant—the Menteshe were signaling back and forth across the miles. The drumbeats carried far better than horn calls could have. The king wondered what the nomads were saying with those kettledrums. He kicked at the dirt inside his tent. He’d served down in the south for years, but he hadn’t learned to make sense of the drums. He knew no Avornans who had. Too bad, he thought.

  The drums went on all through the night. Grus woke several times, and each time heard them thudding and muttering, depending on how far off they were. Every time he woke, he had more trouble falling back to sleep.

  “A letter from King Grus, Your Majesty,” a courier said, and handed King Lanius a rolled and sealed parchment.

  “Thank you,” Lanius said in some surprise; he hadn’t expected anything from Grus. He broke the wax seal and opened the letter. King Grus to King Lanius—greetings, he read, and then, I wonder if you would be kind enough to do me a favor. Does anyone in the royal archives talk about the drum signals the Menteshe use? Does anyone know what the different signals mean? If you can find out, please let me know as quickly as possible. Many thanks for your help. A scrawled signature completed the letter.

  “Is there an answer, Your Majesty?” the courier asked.

  “Yes.” Lanius called for parchment, pen, and ink. King Lanius to Grus—greetings, he wrote; he still hesitated to admit that Grus deserved the royal title. But that reluctance didn’t keep him from continuing, I do not know of any records such as you request, but I have never looked for them, either. I will now, and as soon as I can I will let you know if I find what you want—and, for that matter, if I don’t. He signed the letter, sealed it with candle wax and his signet ring, and gave it to the courier. “Take this to Grus in the south. I want him to know I will give it my full attention.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. Thank you, Your Majesty.” The courier bowed and hurried away.

  Lanius, bemused, headed straight for the archives. Grus had never asked him for information before. He wondered if he could come up with it. He hoped he could. No Avornan could think of the southern provinces being ravaged without cringing. Lanius might still wish Grus didn’t wear the crown. That had nothing to do with whether he wanted Grus to drive the Menteshe out of the kingdom.

  “Drum signals,” Lanius muttered. He knew where a lot of old parchments that had to do with the Menteshe in one way or another were stored. Maybe he could find what Grus wanted in among them.

  He spent the rest of the day trying, but had no luck. He did discover there were even more documents in those crates than he’d thought. He vanished back into the archives after breakfast, and didn’t come out again until suppertime.r />
  When he disappeared early the following morning, too, Sosia called after him, “I hope I’ll see you again before too long.”

  “That’s right,” answered Lanius, who’d only half heard her. Sosia laughed and shook her head; she’d seen such fits take her husband before.

  He found the best light he could in the archives. No one ever did a proper job of cleaning the skylights far above, which left the dusty daylight in there all the more wan and shifting. Lanius had complained about that before. He wondered whether complaining again would do any good. He had his doubts.

  Then he started going through the parchments once more, and forgot about skylights and everything else but the work at hand. He had no trouble finding parchments mentioning the Menteshe drums. The Avornans hadn’t needed long to realize the nomads didn’t pound them for amusement alone. But what they meant? That was a different question.

  The more Lanius read, the more annoyed he got. Why hadn’t his countrymen paid more attention to the drums? More than a few of them, traders and soldiers, had learned the spoken and written language of the Menteshe. Why hadn’t anyone bothered to learn their drum signals? Or, if someone had, why hadn’t he bothered to write them down?

  Lanius kept plugging away. He learned all sorts of interesting things about the Menteshe, things he’d never known or things he’d seen once before and then forgotten. He learned the commands a Menteshe used with a draft horse. Those fascinated him, but they had nothing to do with what Grus wanted.

  I can’t come up empty, Lanius told himself. I just can’t. If he failed here, Grus would never ask him for anything again. As though that weren’t bad enough, the other king would despise the archives. Lanius took that as personally as though Grus were to despise his children.

  And then, half an hour later, the king let out a whoop that echoed through the big archives chamber. He held a report by a soldier who’d served along the Stura in the reign of his own great-great-great-grandfather. The man had carefully described each drum signal the Menteshe used and what it meant.

  After making a copy of the report, Lanius left the chamber. He scribbled a note to go with the copy, sealed them both, and gave them to a courier for the long journey south.

  “You look pleased with yourself,” Sosia answered when he went back to the royal chambers in triumph.

  “I am,” Lanius answered, and then looked down at the dusty finery he wore. “But the servants won’t be pleased with me. I forgot to change before I went into the archives.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Well, well.” Grus eyed the parchment he’d just unrolled. “King Lanius came through for us.”

  Hirundo looked over his shoulder. “He sure did,” the general agreed. “This was in the archives?”

  “That’s what the note with it says,” Grus answered.

  “If we knew this once upon a time, I wonder why we forgot,” Hirundo said.

  “A spell of peace probably lasted longer than any one man’s career,” Grus said. “The people who knew wouldn’t have passed it on to the younger officers who needed to know, and so the chain got broken.”

  “That makes sense,” Hirundo said.

  “Which doesn’t mean it’s true, of course,” Grus said. “How many things that seem to make perfect sense turn out not to have anything to do with what looks sensible?”

  “Oh, a few,” his general replied. “Yes, just a few.”

  “We don’t have to worry about tracking down the whys and wherefores here,” Grus said with a certain relief. “If what Lanius says in that note is true, it happened a long time ago.”

  “Now that we have what we need, though, let’s see what we can do about giving the Menteshe a surprise,” Hirundo said.

  “Oh, yes.” Grus nodded. “That’s the idea.”

  The drums started thumping at sunset that day. In the evening twilight, Grus peered down at the list of calls Lanius had sent him. Three beats, pause, two beats … That meant west. Five quick beats was assemble. Having found those meanings, the king started laughing. Knowing what the drums meant helped him less than he’d hoped it would. Yes, Ulash’s men were to assemble somewhere off to the west. But where?

  Grus snapped his fingers. He didn’t know; this wasn’t a part of Avornis with which he was intimately familiar. But the army had soldiers from all parts of Avornis in it. He called for runners, gave them quick orders, and sent them on their way through the encampment.

  Inside half an hour, they came back with four soldiers, all of them from farms and towns within a few miles of where the army had camped. They bowed low before the king. “Never mind that nonsense,” Grus said impatiently, which made their eyes widen in surprise. “If you were going to gather a large force of horsemen somewhere within a day’s ride west of here, where would you do it?”

  They looked surprised again, but put their heads together even so. After a few minutes of talk, they all nodded. One of them pointed southwest. “Your Majesty, there’s a meadow just this side of the Aternus, before it runs into the Cephisus.” The latter was one of the Nine. The soldier went on, “It’s got good grazing—Olor’s beard, sir, it’s got wonderful grazing—the whole year around. It’s about half a day’s ride that way.”

  “Can you guide us to it?” Grus asked. The man nodded. So did his comrades. And so did the king. “All right, then. Every one of you will do that come morning. You’ll all have a reward, too. Keep quiet about this until then, though.”

  The men loudly promised they would. Grus hoped so, though he wasn’t overoptimistic. His father had always said two men could keep a secret if one of them was dead, and that, if three men tried, one was likely a fool and the other two spies. After leaving a farm not impossibly far from here, his father had come to the city of Avornis and served as a royal guard, so he’d seen enough intrigue to know what he was talking about.

  After sending away the soldiers, Grus summoned Hirundo and Pterocles. He explained what he had in mind. “Can we do this?” he asked.

  “A little risky,” Hirundo said. “More than a little, maybe. We’ll look like idiots if the Menteshe catch on. We may look like dead idiots if they catch on.”

  Grus nodded. He’d already figured that out for himself. He turned to Pterocles. “Can you mask us, or mask some of us?”

  “Some of us,” the wizard answered. “It would have to be some of us. All?” He rolled his eyes. “That would be an impossibly large job for any human wizard.”

  “Do the best you can,” Grus told him. “I don’t expect you to do more than a human wizard’s capable of.”

  “All right, Your Majesty,” Pterocles said.

  “You’re going ahead with this scheme, Your Majesty?” Hirundo asked.

  “Yes,” Grus said. “If it works, we’ll give Ulash’s men a nasty surprise.” And if it doesn’t, they’ll give us one. He refused to worry—too much—about that. By its nature, war involved risk. The gamble here seemed good to the king. If they won, they would win a lot.

  They rode out before sunrise the next morning, the men from close by leading the two divisions into which Grus had split the army. Out of a certain sense of fairness, Grus sent Pterocles off with the division Hirundo led. The king hadn’t ridden far before regretting his generosity. If Pterocles had come with him, he would have had a better chance of staying alive.

  No help for it now, though. As Grus had told his guides to do, they led him and his men on a looping track that would take them around to strike the Menteshe from the west—if the Menteshe were there. Whether they struck them at the same time as Hirundo’s men did was going to be largely a matter of luck.

  One of the guards pointed. “There, Your Majesty! Look!”

  They’d guessed right. Prince Ulash’s nomads were gathering on the meadow. Grus knew exactly the moment when they realized the large force approaching wasn’t theirs but Avornan. So ants boiled after their hill was kicked.

  “Forward!” Grus shouted to the trumpeters. As the fierce horn calls clove th
e air, he set spurs to his gelding. The horse whinnied in pained protest. Grus roweled it again. It bounded ahead. He drew his sword. The sun flashed fire from the blade. “Forward!” he yelled once more.

  Some of the Menteshe started shooting. Others fled. King Grus doubted the nomads were under any sort of unified command. Each chieftain—maybe even each horseman—decided for himself what he would do. That made the Menteshe hard for Avornis to control. It also made them hard for their own warlords to control.

  The Avornans shot back as soon as they came within range. A few of them had already pitched from the saddle. But Ulash’s warriors began falling, too. Soon the Menteshe still hale started fleeing. They had never seen any shame in running away when the odds seemed against them.

  Grus brandished the sword, though he had yet to come within fifty feet of a foe. Where were Hirundo and Pterocles and the other division? Had the wizard masked them so well, they’d disappeared altogether? Had the Banished One swept them off the field, as a man might have removed them from a gaming board? Or had their guides simply gotten lost?

  No sooner had Grus begun to worry than the other Avornan force appeared, as suddenly as though a fog in front of them had blown away. His own men burst into cheers. The Menteshe, suddenly caught between hammer and anvil, cried out in dismay. They all tried to flee now, shooting over their shoulders as they desperately galloped off.

  A lot of the nomads did escape. Grus never had to use his sword. Somehow, none of that mattered much. Many Menteshe lay dead. Looking around, the king could see that his own force hadn’t suffered badly.

  Hirundo saw the same thing. “We hurt ’em this time, your Majesty,” the general said, riding up to Grus.

  “That’s what we set out to do,” Grus replied, though he knew the Avornans didn’t always do what they set out to do against the Menteshe. “Where’s Pterocles? He kept you hidden, all right.”