The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  “An honor I could do without,” Alca said, and shivered in the warm little room.

  Grus agreed with her there, no matter how much the two of them quarreled about their personal affairs. The king asked, “Have you made any progress on spells to cure the thralls? Pterocles seemed to think you had.”

  Her eyes lit up. “Yes. I really think we have. He knows some things I never could have imagined. But then, he found out about them the hard way, too. To be struck down by the Banished One … I’d sooner have the dreams, and that’s the truth.”

  “I believe it. I think you’re right.” Grus hesitated. “It’s dead, isn’t it? When I came to Pelagonia, I thought …” He shook his head. “But no. It really is dead.”

  “You thought that, when you came here with another woman?” Alca shook her head, too—in disbelief. “You can still surprise me, Your Majesty, even when I ought to know better. But yes, it’s as dead as that table there.” She pointed. “And it would be even if you hadn’t brought her along. I know how big a fool I am—not big enough to let you hurt me twice, and I thank the gods I’m not.”

  Suddenly Grus was much more eager to escape this provincial town than he ever had been to come here. “I won’t trouble you anymore,” he mumbled.

  “I’ll work with your wizard,” Alca said. “I’ll do whatever I can to help Avornis. I told you that when I wrote to you. But I don’t think I ever want to see you again.”

  “All right,” Grus said. Just then, it was more than all right. It came as an enormous relief.

  Whenever a courier came into the city of Avornis from the south, King Lanius worried. His chief fear was that Grus might have met disaster at the hands of the Menteshe. That would have put him back on the Diamond Throne as full-fledged ruler of the kingdom, but only by ruining the kingdom. Some prices were too high to pay.

  He had another worry, small only in comparison to that one. So far this fighting season, the Chernagor pirates had stayed away from the Avornan coast. If they descended on it while Grus was busy against the Menteshe … Lanius didn’t know what would happen then, but he knew it wouldn’t be good.

  Reports from Grus came in regularly. He seemed to be making as much progress against the nomads as anyone could reasonably expect. And the coast stayed quiet. No tall-masted ships put in there. No kilted buccaneers swarmed out to loot and burn and kill—and to distract the Avornans from their campaign against Prince Ulash’s Menteshe.

  Lanius wondered why not. If the Banished One’s hand propelled both the Menteshe and the Chernagors against Avornis, couldn’t he set both foes in motion against her at the same time? Failing there struck Lanius as inept, and, while he might wish the god cast down from the heavens made many such mistakes, he’d seen that the Banished One seldom did.

  He asked Prince Vsevolod why the Chernagors were holding back. “Why?” Vsevolod echoed. “I tell you why.” Maybe the sour gleam in his eye said he thought Lanius should have figured it out for himself. Maybe it just said he didn’t care for the King of Avornis. In that case, the feeling was mutual.

  “Go ahead,” Lanius urged.

  “Are two reasons,” Vsevolod said. “First reason is, Avornan ships fight hard two years ago. Not all Chernagor ships get home. Many losses. They not want many losses again.”

  “Yes, I follow that,” Lanius said. “What’s the other reason?”

  “Magic.” The exiled Prince of Nishevatz spoke the word with somber relish. “This spring, they send supply ships to my city-state, send food to my cursed son. And they watch ships burn up. They see food burn, see sailors burn. Not want to see that off coast of Avornis. So they stay home.” Vsevolod jabbed a thumb at his own broad chest. “Me, I like to watch ships burn. Oh, yes. I like very much. Let me watch Vasilko burn—I like that better yet.”

  Lanius believed him. All the same, the king wondered whether the Banished One could have set the Chernagors in motion against Avornis despite their hesitation. Evidently not. The Chernagors, or some of them, were his allies, yes, but not—or not yet—his puppets, as the Menteshe were.

  We can still win, Lanius thought. Avornis wasn’t the only one with troubles. He tried to imagine how the world looked from the Banished One’s perspective. Avornis’ great foe was already doing all he could with the Menteshe. Up in the north, he’d managed to keep Grus from driving Vasilko out of Nishevatz and putting Vsevolod back on the throne there. But if he couldn’t get the Chernagors to work with the Menteshe, they had to make very unsatisfactory tools for him.

  What could he do about that? Lanius wondered if thralls would start showing up in the land of the Chernagors. In an odd way, he hoped so. If anything could frighten the Chernagors who followed the Banished One into changing their allegiance, that might do the trick. Down in the south, the Menteshe wizards had made Avornan peasants into thralls. That bothered the nomads not at all. They would have abused those peasants any which way. But in the north, thralls would have to be Chernagors, not members of an alien folk, and that could work against the Banished One. Despising his mortal opponents, he did sometimes overreach himself. Why not in the north, where things weren’t going just as he wished?

  Vsevolod said, “When you end this silly war in south? When you go back to what is important? When you drive Vasilko from Nishevatz? Two times now, you lay siege, then you quit and go home. Another time, you go home before you lay siege. For me, is like being woman with man who is bad lover. You tease, you tease, you tease—but I never go where I want to go.”

  Perspective. Point of view, Lanius thought again. Vsevolod’s was invincibly self-centered—not that Lanius hadn’t already known that. With some asperity, he said, “I don’t think driving invaders out of our southern provinces is a silly war. What would you do if someone invaded Nishevatz?”

  “No one invades Nishevatz,” Vsevolod said complacently. “Chernagors rule seas. Even Avornis does not dare without me at your side.” He struck a pose.

  Lanius felt like hitting him. Plainly, the King of Avornis had no chance of making things clear to the Prince of Nishevatz. “Your turn will come,” Lanius said. Only after the words were gone did he wonder how he’d meant them. Better not to know, maybe.

  “Not come soon enough,” Vsevolod grumbled, proving he hadn’t taken it the way Lanius feared he might. He gave Lanius a creaky bow. “Not soon enough,” he repeated, and lumbered out of the room.

  As a matter of fact, Lanius agreed with him. The sooner the king got the prince out of the city of Avornis and back to Nishevatz—or anywhere else far, far, away—the happier he would be. Lanius wondered if he could send Vsevolod to the Maze until Grus was ready to campaign in the Chernagor country again. He wouldn’t tell Vsevolod it was exile; he would tell him it was a holiday—a prolonged holiday. Maybe he could bring it off without letting Vsevolod know what was really going on.

  With a sigh of regret, Lanius shook his head. Vsevolod would figure out he’d been insulted. His beaky nose smelled out insults whether they were there or not. And Grus would be furious if Vsevolod thought he was insulted. The other king needed Vsevolod as a figurehead when he fought in the north. Otherwise, he would seem an invader pure and simple.

  Or would he? Vsevolod had henchmen, several of high blood, in the city of Avornis. If anything happened to him, one of them might make a good enough cat’s-paw. Slowly, thoughtfully, Lanius nodded. Yes, that might work. And if it did prove enough, if the king found a cooperative Chernagor, couldn’t he do without the obnoxious Vsevolod? He didn’t know, not for certain, but he did know one thing—he was tempted to find out.

  King Grus looked down into the valley of the Anapus, the river just north of the Stura. He let out a long sigh of relief. He’d spent a lot of time and he’d spent a lot of men coming this far, clearing the Menteshe from several valleys farther north. They’d left devastation behind them, but it was—he hoped—devastation that could be repaired if the nomads didn’t come back and make it worse.

  Hirundo looked down into the valley, too. �
��Wasn’t too far from here that we first met, if I remember right,” the general remarked.

  “I thought it was down in the valley of the Stura, myself,” Grus answered.

  “Was it?” Hirundo shrugged. “Well, even if it was, it wasn’t too far from here, not if you’re looking from the city of Avornis. I know one thing for certain—we were both a lot younger than we are now.”

  “Well … yes.” Grus nodded. “I think time is what happens to you when you’re not looking. Except for a few things, I don’t feel any older now than I did then—but how did the gray get into my beard if I’m not?” He plucked a hair from the middle of the chin. It wasn’t gray. It was white. Muttering, he opened his fingers and let the wind sweep it away. And if the wind could have taken the rest of the white hairs with it, he would have been the happiest man in the world.

  Time, Grus thought, and muttered under his breath. Time worked evils the Banished One couldn’t come close to matching. If Lanius and Grus himself alarmed the Banished One, all the exiled god really had to do was wait. Soon enough, they would be gone, and he could return to whatever schemes he’d had before they came to power. But he who had been Milvago was caught up in time, too, since he’d been cast down from the heavens to the material world. He might not be mortal in any ordinary sense of the word, but he too knew impatience, the sense that he couldn’t wait for things to happen, that he had to make them happen.

  Because of that impatience, he sometimes struck too soon. Sometimes. Grus dared hope this was one of those times.

  “Forward!” he called, and waved to the trumpeters. Their notes blared out the command. Forward the Avornan army went.

  River galleys glided along the Anapus. As Grus and Hirundo had done when they first met, they could use soldiers on land and the galleys as hammer and anvil to smash the Menteshe. The nomads were vulnerable trying to cross rivers. There, the advantage of mobility they had over the Avornans broke down.

  “Let’s push them,” Grus said. Hirundo nodded.

  But the Menteshe didn’t feel like being pushed. Instead of riding south toward the river, they galloped off to east and west, parallel to the stream. And everywhere they went, new fires, new pyres, rose behind them. The Avornans slogged along behind them. The nomads lived off the country even as they ravaged it. Grus’ army remained partly tied to supply wagons.

  And the Menteshe had plans of their own. Grus listened to drums talking back and forth through the night. He’d done that before, but now he understood some of what the drums were saying. If he understood them rightly, the nomads intended to smash his army between two of theirs.

  When he said as much to Hirundo, the general nodded. “We’re trying to do the same to them, Your Majesty,” he said. “All depends on who manages to bring it off.”

  “I know,” Grus said. “Let’s see if we can’t give them a little surprise, though, shall we? I don’t think they know yet that we can follow what the drums say.”

  “We’d better make this win important, then,” Hirundo said. “Otherwise, we’ll have given away a secret without getting a good price for it.”

  Grus hadn’t thought of that. He slowly nodded. Hirundo, as usual, made good sense. The king and the general put their heads together, trying to figure out how to turn what they knew into a real triumph. Grus liked the plan they hammered out.

  Even so, it almost came to pieces at first light the next morning, because the Menteshe attacked sooner than Grus had thought they would. Arrows started arcing toward the Avornan army from east and west even before the sun cleared the eastern horizon. If the Avornans hadn’t pieced together what the drums were saying, his soldiers might have been caught still in their tents. As things were, not all of them had reached the positions he wanted by the time the fighting started.

  But they’d done enough, especially in the east, where he wanted to hold the Menteshe. He had to delay his attack in the west until he had some confidence the east would hold. That meant the nomads peppered his men with arrows for an extra hour or so. But they didn’t push their attack as hard as they might have. Their main assault was supposed to be in the east. So the drums had said, and so it proved.

  “Forward!” Grus shouted when everything was at least close to his liking. The Avornans’ horns wailed. The Menteshe probably understood horn calls the same way he understood their drum signals, but it didn’t matter here. The Avornans rode bigger horses and wore sturdier armor than the Menteshe. At close quarters, they had the edge on the nomads. And, because Prince Ulash’s men were so intent on their own plan, they’d come to close quarters.

  They shouted in dismay when the iron-armored wedge of the Avornan army thundered at them, smashed their line, and hurled it aside. Grus struck out to right and left with his sword. A couple of times, it bit into flesh. More often, it kept one Menteshe or another from getting a good swipe at him.

  When things went wrong, the nomads thought nothing of running away to try again some other time. Grus had expected that. This time, he tried to use it to his own purposes. He’d deployed outriders who shot at the nomads trying to escape to the north. The Menteshe, still surprised at the vigor of his response, recoiled from that direction and galloped south instead.

  That was where he wanted them to go. Only when they drew close to the Anapus did they realize as much. They cried out in dismay again, for the river galleys waited there. Not only that, but the ships also landed marines who shot volley after volley of arrows into the Menteshe. And the catapults on the galleys kept the nomads from closing with the marines and riding them down. After darts from those catapults pinned two or three Menteshe to their horses and knocked several more off their mounts, Ulash’s riders didn’t want to go anywhere near the river.

  Their other choice was charging at Grus and the men he led. That wasn’t the sort of fight they wanted, but desperation served where nothing else would. Shouting fiercely in their own language, the nomads swarmed toward the Avornan army.

  A volley from the Menteshe made several Avornan horsemen pitch from the saddle and crumple to the ground. Wounded horses squealed and screamed. But soon the attacking Menteshe got close enough for Grus’ men to shoot back. And they did, with well-disciplined flights of arrows that tore into the invaders’ front ranks. “Grus! Grus! King Grus!” the Avornans cried.

  Then it wasn’t just arrows anymore. It was swords and javelins and lances. It was men shouting and cursing and shrieking at the top of their lungs. It was iron belling off iron, iron striking sparks from iron, the hot iron stink of blood in the air. It was cut and hack and slash and thrust—and, for Grus, it was hoping he could stay alive.

  He cut at a Menteshe. Along with a shirt of boiled leather that turned arrows almost as well as a mailcoat, the fellow wore a close-fitting iron cap. Grus’ blow jammed it down onto his forehead; the cut from the rim made blood run down into his eyes. He yammered in pain and yanked the iron cap back up with his left hand. But Grus struck again a heartbeat later. His sword crunched into the nomad’s cheek. He felt the blow all the way up into his shoulder. Face a gory mask, the Menteshe slid off over his horse’s tail.

  Another nomad hacked at Grus. He managed to block the blow with his shield. He felt that one all the way to the shoulder, too, and knew his shield arm would be bruised and sore come morning. But if he hadn’t turned the blade aside, it would have bitten into his ribs. He hoped his mailshirt and the padding beneath would have kept it out of his vitals, but that wasn’t the sort of thing anybody wanted to find out the hard way.

  An Avornan to Grus’ left engaged the Menteshe before he could slash at the king again. An arrow hissed past Grus’ head, the sound of its passage as malignant as a wasp’s buzz—and its sting, if it had struck home, far more deadly.

  For a little while, he worried that the nomads’ fear and desperation would fire them to break through his battle line. But the Avornans held, and then began pushing Ulash’s riders back toward the Anapus regardless of whether they wanted to go that way. When the marin
es from the river galleys and the catapults on the ships began galling them again, they broke, riding off wildly in all directions.

  “After them!” Grus croaked. He took a swig from his water bottle to lay the dust in his throat, then shouted out the command. Still crying out his name, the Avornans thundered after their foes. Some of the Menteshe got away, but many fell.

  Hirundo was bleeding from a cut on the back of his sword hand. He didn’t even seem to know he had the wound. “Not bad, Your Majesty,” he said. “Not bad at all, by the gods. We hurt ’em bad this time.”

  “Yes,” Grus said. “It’s only fair—they’ve done the same to us.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  King Lanius sat on the Diamond Throne. The weight of the royal crown was heavy on his head. His most splendid royal robes, shot through with gold threads and encrusted with jewels and pearls, were as heavy as a mailshirt. Down below his high seat, royal bodyguards clutched swords and spears. The men were as nervous as big, tough farm dogs when wolves came near. And Lanius was nervous, too. He hadn’t expected an embassy from the Chernagor city-state of Durdevatz. Men from Durdevatz had brought him his monkeys. In those days, though, peace had reigned between the Chernagors and Avornis. Things were different now.

  But how different were they? Lanius himself didn’t know. From what he did know, Durdevatz wasn’t one of the city-states that had helped resupply Nishevatz when Grus besieged it. Who could say for certain what had happened since then, though? No one could—which explained why the guards clung so tightly to their weapons.

  And along with the guards stood a pair of wizards tricked out in helmets and mailshirts, shields and swords. They wouldn’t be worth much in a fight, but the disguise might help them cast their spells if any of the Chernagors in the embassy tried to loose magic against the king.

  Would the men from Durdevatz do such a thing? Lanius didn’t know that, either. All he knew was, he didn’t want to find out the hard way that he should have had sorcerers there.