The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  A stir at the far end of the throne room. Courtiers’ heads swung that way. The envoys from Durdevatz came toward the throne. They were large, burly men with proud hooked noses, thick dark curly beards, and black hair worn in neat buns at the napes of their necks. They wore linen shirts enlivened by fancy embroidery at the chest and shoulders, wool knee-length kilts with checks on dark backgrounds, and boots that reached halfway up their calves. They all had very hairy legs, judging by the bits that showed between boot tops and kilts.

  Their leader wore the fanciest shirt of all. He bowed low to Lanius, low enough to show the bald spot on top of his head. “Greetings, Your Majesty,” he said in fluent but gutturally accented Avornan.

  “Greetings to you.” As he went through the formula of introduction with the ambassador, Lanius kept his voice as noncommittal as he could. “You are …?”

  “My name is Kolovrat, Your Majesty,” the ambassador from Durdevatz replied. “I bring you not only my own greetings but also those of my overlord, Prince Ratibor, and also the greetings of all the other princes of the Chernagors.”

  A brief murmur ran through the throne room. Lanius would have murmured, too, if he hadn’t been sitting on the Diamond Throne before everyone’s eye. “Prince.… Ratibor?” he said. “What, ah, happened to Prince Bolush?” Asking a question like that broke protocol, but no one in Avornis had heard that Bolush had lost his throne.

  Kolovrat didn’t seem put out at the question. “A hunting accident, Your Majesty,” he replied. “Very sad.”

  Lanius wondered how accidental the accident had been. He also wondered where Ratibor and Kolovrat stood on any number of interesting and important questions. For now, though, formula prevailed. He said, “I am pleased to accept Prince Ratibor’s greetings along with your own.” Am I? Well, I’ll find out. He didn’t mention the other Chernagor princes. For one thing, Kolovrat had no real authority to speak for them. For another, at least half of them were at war with Avornis at the moment.

  “In my prince’s name, I thank you, Your Majesty.” Kolovrat bowed.

  “I am pleased to have gifts for you and your comrades,” Lanius said. A courtier handed leather sacks to the ambassador and the other Chernagors.

  “I thank you again,” Kolovrat said with another bow. “And I am pleased to have gifts for you as well, Your Majesty.”

  Now all the courtiers leaned forward expectantly. Lanius had gotten not only his first monkeys but also his first pair of moncats from Chernagor envoys. Those earlier ambassadors had been at least as much merchants as they were diplomats. Lanius thought Kolovrat really did come straight from Prince Ratibor.

  The king’s guardsmen and the wizards masquerading as guardsmen also leaned forward, ready to protect Lanius if this embassy turned out to be an elaborate disguise for an assassination attempt. That had occurred to the king, too. For once, he wished the Diamond Throne didn’t elevate him to quite such a magnificent height. Sitting on it, he made a good target.

  But when one of the Chernagors standing behind Kolovrat opened a box, no arrows or sheets of flame or spiny, possibly poisonous monsters burst from it. Instead, it held … Were those, could those be … parchments?

  Kolovrat said, “Prince Ratibor discovered these old writings in the cathedral after the High Hallow of Durdevatz set the princely crown upon his head. He has heard of your fondness for such things, and sends them to you with his warmest esteem and compliments.”

  The guardsmen relaxed. So did the wizards. Whatever Ratibor thought about Lanius, he didn’t seem inclined to murder him. The Avornan courtiers drew back with dismay bordering on disgust. Old parchments? Not a lot interesting about them!

  Lanius? Lanius beamed. “Thank you very much!” he exclaimed. “Please give my most sincere thanks to His Highness as well. I look forward to finding out what these old parchments say. They’re from the cathedral, you tell me?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” Kolovrat nodded.

  “How … interesting.” Now the king could hardly wait to get his hands on the documents. Parchments from the cathedral at Durdevatz could be very old indeed. Lanius wondered if they went back to the days before the Chernagors swooped down on the coast of the Northern Sea and took the towns there away from Avornis. That didn’t seem likely, but it wasn’t impossible, either.

  “I am sure your pleasure will delight Prince Ratibor.” Kolovrat said all the right things. He still sounded more than a little amazed, though, that Lanius was pleased with the present.

  That amazement made Lanius curious. “How did Prince Ratibor know I would like this gift so well?” he asked.

  “How, Your Majesty? Prince Ratibor is a clever man. That is how,” Kolovrat answered. “And he knows you too are a clever man. He knows you will aid Durdevatz in her hour of need.”

  Aha. Now we come down to it, Lanius thought. He hadn’t supposed Ratibor had sent an embassy just for the sake of sending one—and Ratibor evidently hadn’t. “What does your prince want from Avornis?” the king asked cautiously.

  “Nishevatz and the city-states allied with Nishevatz harry us,” Kolovrat said. “Without help, we do not know how long we can stay free. We fear what will come if we lose our struggle. Vasilko is the Prince of Nishevatz, but everyone knows who Vasilko’s prince is.”

  He means the Banished One, Lanius thought unhappily. He wished the new Prince of Durdevatz had come to him with some foolish, trivial request, something he could either grant or refuse with no twinge of conscience. Whatever he did now, he would have more than twinges. “Tell me what Prince Ratibor wants from us,” he said. “I do not know how much I can give. We are at war in the south, you know. Avornis itself is invaded.”

  “Yes. I know this,” Kolovrat said. “But what you can do, with soldiers or ships, Prince Ratibor hopes you will. Durdevatz is hard pressed. If you can send us any aid at all, we will be ever grateful to the rich and splendid Kingdom of Avornis. So my prince swears, by all the gods in the heavens.”

  Not too long before, in the archives, Lanius had come across a copy of a letter from his father to some baron or another. That happened every so often; it never failed to give him an odd feeling. He’d been a little boy when King Mergus died, and didn’t remember him well. Surviving documents helped him understand the cynical but sometimes oddly charming man who’d sired him.

  The Avornan noble had apparently promised King Mergus eternal gratitude if he would do something for him. And Mergus had written back, Gratitude, Your Excellency, is worth its weight in gold.

  That came back to Lanius now, though he rather wished it wouldn’t have. But sometimes things needed doing regardless of whether the people for whom you did them could ever properly repay you. The king feared this would be one of those times. He said, “When you go back to Durdevatz, tell him Avornis will do what it can for him. I don’t know what that will be, not yet, but we’ll do it.”

  Kolovrat bowed very low. “May the gods bless you, Your Majesty.”

  “Yes,” Lanius said, wondering how he would meet the promise he’d just made. “May they bless me indeed.”

  Grus was questioning prisoners when a courier came down from the north. Quite a few Menteshe spoke at least a little Avornan, and the nomads were often breathtakingly candid about what they wanted to do to Avornis. “We will pasture our flocks and our herds in your meadows,” a chieftain declared. “We will kill your peasants—kill them or make them into thralls, whichever suits us better. Your cities will be our cities. We will worship the Fallen Star, the true light of the world, in your cathedrals.”

  “Really? Then how did we happen to capture you?” Grus asked in mild tones.

  With a blithe shrug—surprisingly blithe, considering that he was a captive—the fellow answered, “I made a mistake. It happens to all of us. You, for instance”—he pointed at Grus—“do not bow before the Fallen Star. You will pay for your mistake, and worse than I have paid for mine.”

  “Oh?” Grus said. “Suppose I kill you now?”

 
; Another shrug. “Even then.” As far as Grus could tell, that wasn’t bravado. The Menteshe meant it. Scowling, the king gestured to the guards who surrounded the prisoner. They took him away. But his confidence lingered. It worried Grus. As far as he could tell, all the nomads felt that way. It made them more dangerous than they would have been if they’d had the same sort of doubts he did.

  And yet, no matter how confident they were, he’d driven them back a long way and inflicted some stinging defeats on them. As soon as he cleared them from the valley of the Anapus, he could move down to the Stura and drive them off Avornan soil altogether. He hoped he would be able to do that before winter ended campaigning. He didn’t want the Menteshe lingering in Avornis until spring. That would be a disaster, nothing less.

  What they’d already done was disastrous enough. Because of their devastation, crops here in the south were going to be only a fraction of normal. Pelagonia wasn’t the only city liable to see hunger this winter—far from it. And how were farmers supposed to pay their taxes when they had no crops to sell for cash? The government of Avornis would see hunger this winter, too.

  And all that said nothing about men killed, women violated, children orphaned, livestock slaughtered. Every time he thought about it, he seethed. What he wanted to do was go after the Menteshe south of the Stura, take the fighting to them, and let them see how they liked it.

  What he wanted to do and what he could do were two different things. Until he had—until Avornis had—some reliable way to cure thralls and to keep men from being made into thralls, he didn’t dare cross the river. Defeat would turn into catastrophe if he did. And then his son and his son-in-law would fight over who succeeded him. That would be another catastrophe, no matter who won. Grus had his own opinion about who would, had it and refused to dwell on it.

  The guards brought up another prisoner. This one blustered, saying, “I do not care how you torture me. I am Prince Ulash’s man, and the Fallen Star’s.”

  “Who said anything about torturing you?” Grus asked.

  “Avornans do that,” the Menteshe said. “Everyone knows it.”

  “Oh? How many prisoners whom we’ve tortured have you met?” King Grus knew Avornans sometimes did torture prisoners, when they were trying to pull out something the captive didn’t want to say. But his folk didn’t do it regularly, as the Menteshe did.

  “Everyone knows you do it,” the nomad repeated.

  “How do you know?” Grus said again. “Who told you? Did you meet prisoners who told you what we did to them?” If the man had, he was out of luck.

  But the Menteshe shook his head. “There is no need. Our chieftains have said it. If they say it, it must be true.”

  Grus sent him away. It was either that or go to work on him with ropes and knives and heated iron. Nothing short of torture would persuade him what his chieftains said was untrue—and torture, here, would only prove it was true. The king muttered to himself, most discontented. The nomad had won that round.

  He muttered more when his army crossed the Anapus. Devastation on the southern side of the river was even worse than it had been in the north. The Menteshe might have had trouble crossing the Anapus. They’d spent more time below it, and found more ways to amuse themselves while they were there. Grus began to wonder what things would be like in the valley of the Stura. Could they be worse than what he was seeing here? He didn’t know how, but did know the Menteshe were liable to instruct him.

  Before he could worry too much about the valley of the Stura, he had to finish clearing Prince Ulash’s men from the valley of the Anapus. The Menteshe on the southern side of the river didn’t try to make a stand. Instead, after shooting arrows at his army as it landed, they scattered. That left him with a familiar dilemma—how small were the chunks into which he could break up his army as he pursued? If he divided it up into many small ones, he ran the risk of having the Menteshe ambush and destroy some of them. Remembering what had happened to the troop farther north, he wasn’t eager to risk that.

  Eager or not, he did. Getting rid of the Menteshe came first. This time, things went the way he wanted them to. The nomads didn’t linger and fight. They fled over the hills to the south, toward the valley of the Stura.

  As Grus reassembled his army to go after them, he said, “I wonder if they’ll fight hard down there, or if they’ll see they’re beaten and go back to their own side of the river.”

  “That’s why we’re going down there, Your Majesty,” Hirundo answered. “To find out what they’ll do, I mean.”

  “No.” The king shook his head. “That’s not why. We’re going down there to make sure they do what we want.”

  The general thought it over. He nodded. “Well, I can’t tell you you’re wrong. Of course, if I tried you’d probably send me to the Maze.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.” Grus shook his head again. “I have a worse punishment than that in mind.” Hirundo raised a questioning eyebrow. Grus went on, “I’ll leave you right here, in command against the cursed Menteshe.”

  “No wonder people say you’re a cruel, hard king!” Hirundo quailed in artfully simulated terror.

  Even though he was joking, what he said touched a nerve. “Do people say that?” Grus asked. “It’s not what I try to be.” He sounded wistful, even a little—maybe more than a little—plaintive.

  “I know, Your Majesty,” Hirundo said quickly.

  Grus stayed thoughtful and not very happy the rest of the day. He knew he’d given people reason to curse his name. He’d sent more than a few men to the Maze. He reckoned that merciful; he could have killed them instead. But they and their families would still find him cruel and hard, as Hirundo had said. And he hadn’t given towns ravaged by the Menteshe as much help as they would have liked. He didn’t think he could afford to. Still … He wished he could do all the things the people of Avornis wanted him to do. He also wished none of those people spent any time plotting against him. That would have made his life easier. It would have, yes, but he feared he couldn’t hold his breath waiting for it to happen.

  What could he do? “Go on,” he muttered to himself. Seeing nothing else, he turned back to Hirundo. “Let’s finish cleaning the Menteshe out of this valley, and then we’ll go on to the next.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. Ahh …” The general paused, then said, “If you want to push on to the Stura, and to leave garrisons in the passes to keep Ulash’s men from getting through, our second-line soldiers could probably finish hunting down the nomads left behind. Or don’t you think so?”

  Grus paused, too. Then he nodded. “Yes. That’s good, Hirundo. Thank you. We’ll do it. Farther north, I wouldn’t have, but here? You bet I will. It lets me get down to the border faster, and we may be able to give the Menteshe a surprise when we show up there sooner than they expect us to.”

  He set things in motion the next day. Some of the armed peasants and townsmen and the river-galley marines he ordered out against the Menteshe would probably get mauled. But he would be getting the best use out of his soldiers, and that mattered more. Hirundo had done what a good general was supposed to do when he made his suggestions.

  From the top of the pass the army took down into the valley of the Stura, Grus eyed the pillars of black smoke rising into the sky here and there. They spoke of the destruction Ulash’s men were working, but they also told him where the Menteshe were busy. He pointed to the closest one. “Let’s go hunting.”

  Hunt they did. They didn’t have the bag Grus would have wanted, for Prince Ulash’s riders fled before them. Here, though, the ground through which the Menteshe could flee was narrow—unless, of course, they crossed the Stura and left Avornis altogether. Grus would sooner have wiped them off the face of the earth than seen them get away, but he would sooner have seen them get away than go on ravaging his kingdom.

  Not all of the men who tried to get away succeeded. Avornan river galleys slid along the Stura. As Grus had, their skippers enjoyed nothing more than ramming and sinking the small
boats the Menteshe used to cross the river. But here the Avornans didn’t have everything their own way, as they had farther north. Ulash had river galleys in the Stura, too. When Grus first saw them come forth and assail his ships, he cursed and grinned at the same time. Yes, the Menteshe could cause trouble on the river. But they could also find trouble there, and he hoped they would.

  Before long, they did. The Menteshe had galleys in the Stura, true, but their crews weren’t and never had been a match for the Avornans. After Grus’ countrymen sank several galleys full of nomads and lost none themselves, the Menteshe stopped challenging them.

  “Too bad,” Grus said. “They’re trouble on land. On the water?” He shook his head, then waved toward Hirundo. “They make you look like a good sailor.”

  “Then they must be hopeless,” Hirundo declared.

  “Maybe they are,” Grus said. “Now if only they were horsemen like me, too.”

  That the Menteshe weren’t. They shot up a squadron of Avornan cavalry who pursued them too enthusiastically, then delivered a charge with the scimitar that sent Grus’ men, or those who survived, reeling off in headlong retreat. It was a bold exploit, especially since the Menteshe had spent so long falling back before the Avornans. Grus would have admired it more if the nomads hadn’t hacked up the corpses of the men they’d slain.

  “We think, when we die, we die dead,” a captured Menteshe told him. “Only when the Fallen Star regains his place do we live on after death. But you foolish Avornans, you think you last forever. We treat bodies so to show you what is true—for now, you are nothing but flesh, the same as us.”

  He spoke excellent Avornan, with conviction chilling enough to make Grus shiver. If this life was all a man had, why not do whatever pleased at the moment? What would stop you, except brute force here on earth? How could a man sure he was trapped in one brief life show any signs of conscience? By all the evidence from the Menteshe, he couldn’t. And no wonder the nomads clung so strongly to the Banished One. If they thought his triumph was their only hope for life after death …