The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  This wasn’t the first such report Grus had heard. He scratched his head. Up until a few days before, Prince Ulash’s men hadn’t been doing anything of the sort. Sudden changes in what the Menteshe were up to made the King of Avornis deeply suspicious. “What have they got in mind?” he asked, though the lieutenant wasn’t going to know.

  As he’d expected, the young officer shrugged and answered, “No idea, sir. We don’t get the chance to ask them a whole lot of questions. When we ram ’em, we sink ’em.” By the pride in his voice, he wanted to do nothing but sink them.

  That suited Grus fine. He wanted his river-galley officers aggressive. He said, “Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll see what I can do to get to the bottom of this.”

  The officer bowed and left. Grus scratched his head again. He didn’t shake any answers loose. He hadn’t really thought he would. Being without answers, he summoned Pterocles. The wizard heard him out, then said, “That is interesting, Your Majesty. Why would they start going over the river now when they had seemed to want to stay on this side and fight?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me,” Grus said. “Has there been a magical summons? Has the Banished One taken a hand in things?”

  “I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.” Pterocles spoke cautiously. Grus approved of that caution. Pterocles recognized the possibility that something might have slipped past him. He said, “I have spells that would tell me if something has gone on under my nose. A summons like that lingers on the ether. If it was there, I’ll find out about it.”

  “Good,” Grus said. “Let me know.”

  When Pterocles came back that afternoon, he looked puzzled and troubled. “Your Majesty, if any sort of sorcerous summons came north, I can’t find it,” he said. “I don’t quite know what that means.”

  “Neither do I,” Grus said. Had the Banished One deceived his wizard? Or was Pterocles searching for something that wasn’t there to find? “If you know any other spells, you ought to use them,” Grus told him.

  Pterocles nodded. “I will, though I’ve already tried the ones I think likeliest to work. You ought to try to take some Menteshe prisoners, too. They may know something I don’t.”

  “I’ll do that,” Grus said at once. “I should have sent men out to do it when I first called you. A lot of the time, the Menteshe like to sing.”

  He gave the orders. His men rode out. But Menteshe were starting to get scarce on the ground. Even a week earlier, discovering so few of them on the Avornan side of the Stura would have made Grus rejoice. He would have rejoiced now, if his men were the ones responsible for making the nomads want to get back to the lands they usually roamed. But his men hadn’t driven the Menteshe over the Stura, and he knew it. That left him suspicious. Why were the Menteshe leaving—fleeing—Avornis when they didn’t have to?

  “I know what it is,” Hirundo said when a day’s search resulted in no prisoners.

  “Tell me,” Grus urged. “I haven’t got any idea why they’re going.”

  “It’s simple,” the general answered. “They must have heard you were going to put a tax on nomads in Avornis, so of course they ran away from it.” He grinned at his own cleverness. “By Olor’s beard, I would, too.”

  “Funny.” Grus tried to sound severe, but a smile couldn’t help creeping out from behind the edges of his beard—it was funny, even if he wished it weren’t. He wagged a finger at Hirundo, who kept right on grinning, completely unabashed. Grus said, “Do you have any real idea why they’re doing it?”

  “No,” Hirundo admitted. “All I can say is, good riddance.”

  “Certainly, good riddance.” But Grus remained dissatisfied, like a man who’d just enjoyed a feast but had an annoying piece of gristle stuck between two back teeth. “They shouldn’t be running away, though, not when we haven’t finished beating them. They’ve never done that before.”

  “Maybe they know we’re going to win this time, and so they want to save themselves for fights next year or the year after,” Hirundo suggested.

  “Maybe.” Grus still didn’t sound happy—still wasn’t happy. He explained why, repeating, “They’ve never done that before.” The Menteshe usually did the same sort of things over and over again. If they changed their ways, they had to have a reason … didn’t they?

  “Maybe the Banished One is telling them what to do,” Hirundo said.

  “Of course the Banished One is telling them what to do,” Grus answered. He hated the idea, which didn’t mean he disbelieved it. “They’re his creatures. They’re proud to be his creatures. But why is he telling them to do that? And how is he telling them? Pterocles can’t find any of his magic.”

  Hirundo considered, then brightened. “Maybe he’s trying to drive you mad, to make you find reasons for things that haven’t got any.”

  “Thank you so much,” Grus said. Hirundo bowed back, as he might have after any extraordinarily meritorious service. The worst of it was, Grus couldn’t be sure the general was wrong. The king knew he would go right on wasting time and losing sleep until he found an answer he could believe. He sighed. “The more we go on like this, the plainer it gets that we need prisoners. Until we know more, we’ll just keep coming out with one stupid guess after another.”

  “I don’t think my guesses were stupid.” Mock anger filled Hirundo’s voice. “I think they were clever, perceptive, even brilliant.”

  “You would,” the king muttered. “When your men finally do bring back a captive or two, we’ll see how brilliant and perceptive you were.”

  “They’re doing their best, the same as I am,” Hirundo said.

  “I hope theirs is better than yours.” Grus made sure he smiled so Hirundo knew he was joking. The horrible face the general made said he got the message but didn’t much care for it.

  Along with the cavalry, the men aboard the river galleys got orders to capture Menteshe if they could. If they could … Suddenly, the lands on this side of the Stura began to seem like a country where the birds had just flown south for the winter. They had been here. The memory of them lingered. They would come back. But for now, when you wanted them most, they were gone.

  Grus had never imagined that winning a war could leave him so unhappy. He had questions he wanted to ask, questions he needed to ask, and nobody to whom to ask them. He’d snarled at Hirundo in play. He started snarling at people in earnest.

  “They’re gone,” Alauda said. “Thank the gods for it. Praise the gods for it. But, by Queen Quelea’s mercy, don’t complain about it.”

  “I want to know why,” Grus said stubbornly. “They aren’t acting the way they’re supposed to, and that bothers me.” He’d been down this same road with Hirundo.

  His new mistress had less patience for it. “Who cares?” she said with a toss of the head. “As long as they’re out of the kingdom, nothing else matters.” That held enough truth to be annoying, but not enough to make Grus quit trying to lay his hands on some of the nomads.

  When at last he did, it was much easier than he’d thought it would be. Like a flock of birds that had fallen behind the rest because of a storm, a band of about twenty Menteshe rode down to the Stura and then along it, looking for boats to steal so they could cross. Three river galleys and a regiment of Hirundo’s horsemen converged on them. When Grus heard the news, he feared the nomads would fight to the death just to thwart him. But they didn’t. Overmatched, they threw up their hands and surrendered.

  Their chieftain, a bushy-eyebrowed, big-nosed fellow named Yavlak, proved to speak good Avornan. “Here he is, Your Majesty,” Hirundo said, as though he were making Grus a present of the man.

  And Grus felt as though Yavlak were a present, too. “Why are you Menteshe leaving Avornis?” he demanded.

  Yavlak looked at him as he would have looked at any idiot. “Because we have to,” he answered.

  “You have to? Who told you you have to? Was it the Banished One?” The king knew he sounded nervous, but couldn’t help it.

  �
��The Fallen Star?” Now Yavlak looked puzzled. With those eyebrows, he did it very well. “No, the Fallen Star has nothing to do with it. Can it be you have not heard?” He didn’t seem to want to believe that; he acted like a man who had no choice. “By some mischance, we found out late. I thought even you miserable Avornans would surely know by now.”

  “Found out what? Know what?” Grus wanted to strangle him. The only thing that held him back was the certain knowledge that he would have to go through this again with another nomad, one who might not be so fluent in Avornan, if he did.

  Yavlak finally—and rudely—obliged him. “You stupid fool,” he said. “Found out that Prince Ulash is dead, of course.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Prince Ulash is dead.”

  King Lanius stared at the messenger who brought the word north to the city of Avornis. “Are you sure?” he blurted. He realized the question was foolish as soon as it came out of his mouth. He couldn’t help asking, though. Ulash had been the strongest and canniest prince among the Menteshe for longer than Lanius had been alive. Imagining how things would go without him was nothing but a leap in the dark.

  The messenger took the question seriously. That was one of the privileges of being a sovereign. “Yes, Your Majesty. There’s no doubt,” he answered. “The nomads went south of the Stura when they didn’t have to, and prisoners have told King Grus why.”

  “All right. Thank you,” Lanius said, and then, as an afterthought, “Do you know who succeeds him? Is it Prince Sanjar or Prince Korkut?”

  “That I can’t tell you. The nomads King Grus caught didn’t know,” the messenger said. “Grus is on his way back here now, with part of the army. The rest will stay in the south, in case whichever one of Ulash’s sons does take over decides to start the war up again.”

  “Sensible,” Lanius said, hoping neither the messenger nor his own courtiers noticed his small sigh. With Grus back in the capital, Lanius would become a figurehead again. Part of Lanius insisted that didn’t matter—Grus was better at the day-to-day business of running Avornis than he was, and was welcome to it. But Lanius remembered how often he’d had power taken away from him. He resented it. He couldn’t help resenting it.

  He dismissed the messenger, who bowed his way out of the throne room. As the king descended from the Diamond Throne, the news beat in his brain, pulsing like his own blood, pounding like a drum. Prince Ulash is dead.

  What would come next? Lanius didn’t know. He was no prophet, to play the risky game of foreseeing the future. But things wouldn’t be the same. Neither Sanjar nor Korkut could hope to match Ulash for experience or cleverness.

  Will whichever one of them comes to power in Yozgat make an apter tool for the Banished One’s hand? Lanius wondered. Again, he could only shrug. He had believed Ulash’s cleverness and power and success had won him more freedom of action than most Menteshe owned. But then the prince had hurled his nomads northward to help hold Grus away from Nishevatz. When the Banished One told him to move, he’d moved. So much for freedom of action.

  By the time Lanius got back to his living quarters, news of Ulash’s death had spread all over the palace. Not everyone seemed sure who Ulash was. The king went past a couple of servants arguing over whether he was King of Thervingia or prince of a Chernagor city-state.

  “Well, whoever he is, he isn’t anymore,” said the man who thought he’d ruled Thervingia.

  “That’s true,” the other servant said. “It’s the first true thing you’ve said all day, too.”

  They could afford to quarrel, and to be ignorant. Lanius, who couldn’t, almost envied them. Almost—he valued education and knowledge too highly to be comfortable with ignorance.

  Rounding a corner, the king almost bumped into Prince Ortalis. They both gave back a pace. Grus’ son said, “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?” Lanius thought he knew what Ortalis meant, but he might have been wrong.

  He wasn’t. “Is the old bugger south of the Stura dead at last?” Ortalis asked, adding, “That’s what everybody’s saying.”

  “That’s what your father says, or rather his messenger,” Lanius answered, and watched his brother-in-law scowl. Ortalis and Grus still didn’t get along. They probably never would. Lanius went on, “Now that the Menteshe have gone back to their own side of the border, your father will be coming home.”

  “Will he?” Ortalis didn’t bother trying to hide his displeasure at the news. “I hoped he’d stay down there and chase them all the way to what’s-its-name, the place where they’ve stashed the what-do-you-call-it.”

  “Yozgat. The Scepter of Mercy.” Yes, Lanius did prefer knowledge to ignorance. He brought out the names Ortalis needed but didn’t bother remembering as automatically as he breathed. He judged that his brother-in-law wanted Grus to go on campaigning in the south not so much because he hoped Avornan arms would triumph as because Grus would stay far away from the city of Avornis. Lanius couldn’t do anything but try to stay out of the way when Grus and Ortalis clashed. Doing his best to stay on safer ground, the king said, “I hope Princess Limosa is well?”

  “Oh, yes,” Ortalis said with a smile. “She’s fine. She’s just fine.”

  In a different tone of voice, with a different curve of the lips, the answer would have been fine, just fine, too. As things were, Lanius pushed past his brother-in-law as fast as he could. He tried telling himself he hadn’t seen what he thought he had. Ortalis had looked and sounded that very same way, had had that very same gleam in his eye, when he was butchering a deer and up to his elbows in blood. He’d never seemed happier.

  Lanius shook his head again and again. But no, he couldn’t make that certainty fall out. And he couldn’t make himself believe anymore that Zenaida hadn’t known exactly what she was talking about.

  He also couldn’t help remembering how serene, how radiant, how joyful Limosa looked. That couldn’t be an act. But he didn’t see how it could be real, either.

  “Well, well,” Grus said when he saw the towers of the palace, the cathedral’s heaven-reaching spire, and the other tall buildings of the city of Avornis above the walls that protected the capital from invaders. “I’m really coming home. I’m not just stopping for a little while before I have to rush north or south as fast as I can.”

  “You hope you’re not; anyhow,” Hirundo said.

  Grus glared at him, but finally gave back a reluctant nod. “Yes. I hope I’m not.”

  Guards on the wall had seen the approaching army, too. A postern gate opened. A rider came out to make sure it really was an Avornan force. When he waved, the main gates swung open.

  Not all the army that had accompanied Grus up from the south went into the city of Avornis. Much of the part that wasn’t on garrison duty down by the Stura had gone into barracks in towns on the way north, to spread the problem of feeding the soldiers over as much of the kingdom as possible. If a dreadful winter—say, a dreadful winter inspired by the Banished One—overwhelmed Avornis, extra mouths to feed in the capital, which was already much the largest city in the kingdom, would only make matters worse.

  Instead of waiting at the royal palace, Lanius met Grus halfway there. “You must tell me at once—did Sanjar or Korkut succeed Prince Ulash?” Lanius said. By his expression, he was ready to do something drastic if Grus didn’t take that at once seriously.

  “I’ll tell you everything I know,” Grus promised. “And everything I know is—I don’t know.”

  “Oh … drat!” Lanius got more use out of what wasn’t even really a curse than Grus could have from a couple of minutes of blasphemy and obscenity. His son-in-law went on, “I think which of them takes over in Yozgat really is important for Avornis. Korkut will cause us more trouble than Sanjar, though neither one of them is half the man their father was.”

  “How do you know even that much about them?” Grus asked. “They’re both just names to me.”

  “I’ve been going through the archives—how else?” Lanius answered. “Thin
gs our traders who went south of the Stura in peacetime heard about them, things Ulash’s ambassadors who came up here had to say. Korkut is older, but Sanjar is the son of the woman who became Ulash’s favorite.”

  “Isn’t that interesting?” Grus said. “You’ll have to tell me more.”

  Now the other king looked faintly abashed. “I’ve already told you almost everything I know.”

  “Oh.” Grus shrugged. “Well, you’re right—it is important. And it’s already more than I knew before.” After that, Lanius brightened. Grus went on, “How are things here? How’s Prince Vsevolod?”

  The other king’s lip curled. “About the way you’d expect. He’s still annoyed that we had the nerve to defend our own borders instead of going on with the fight to put him back on the throne of Nishevatz, which would actually be important.”

  “Oh,” Grus said again, his tone falling. “Well, you’re right. I can’t say I’m surprised. How are other things?”

  “They seem all right,” Lanius answered. “Most of them, anyhow.”

  What was that supposed to mean? One obvious answer occurred to Grus. “Is my son all right?” he asked.

  “Prince Ortalis is fine. He and Princess Limosa seem very happy together, no matter how they happened to meet and wed,” Lanius said.

  He spoke with caution he didn’t try to hide. Grus knew he didn’t like Ortalis. Maybe that explained the caution. Or maybe there were things he could have said if they weren’t out in the street. Finding out which would have to wait. Grus said, “Let’s get back to the palace. I’m glad the Chernagors didn’t raid our coast this year.”

  “Yes, so am I,” Lanius said. “How would you have handled it if they did?”

  “Badly, I suspect,” Grus answered. Lanius blinked, then laughed; maybe he hadn’t expected such blunt honesty. Grus asked, “How are your moncats doing?”

  “Very well,” Lanius said enthusiastically, and told Grus more than he wanted to hear about the antics and thievery of the beast called Pouncer.

  Not least because Lanius had bored him, Grus put a sardonic edge in his voice when he asked, “And have you found any other pets while I was away?” He made it plain he didn’t mean any that walked on four legs.