The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  He brought them down into a frown now. “What are you doing on my land?” he demanded. “You have no business here, curse it.”

  “What were your ships doing raiding my coast a few years ago?” Grus asked in turn.

  “That’s different,” Gleb said.

  “Yes, it is, by the gods, and I know how,” Grus said. “The difference is, you never thought I’d come here to pay you back.”

  Gleb scowled. He didn’t try to deny it, from which Grus concluded that he couldn’t. All he said was, “Well, now that you are here, what do I have to do to get rid of you?”

  “Wait.” Grus held up a hand. “Don’t go so fast. We’re not done with this bit yet. What were your men doing helping Vasilko against Prince Vsevolod? What were they doing helping the Banished One against the gods in the heavens? Do you still bend the knee to the Banished One, Your Highness?”

  “I never did.” Gleb sounded indignant.

  “No? Then what were you doing helping Vasilko? I already asked you once, and you didn’t answer.”

  “What was I doing? You Avornans invaded the land of the Chernagors. What was I supposed to do, let you have your way here? If I could hurt you, I would.”

  Now Grus was the one who scowled. He’d had Chernagors tell him that before. He could understand it, even believe it. But it also made such a handy excuse. “And you’re telling me you had no idea Vasilko had abandoned the gods in the heavens, and that the Banished One backed him? Do you expect me to believe you?”

  “I don’t care what you believe,” Gleb said.

  “No?” Grus said. “Are you sure of that? Are you very sure? Because if you are, I am going to ravage your countryside. Being a friend to other Chernagors is one thing. Being a friend to the Banished One is something else again.”

  Prince Gleb opened his mouth. Then he closed it again without saying anything. After an obvious pause for thought, he tried again. “I told you once, I do not worship the Banished One. I give reverence to King Olor and Queen Quelea and the rest of the gods in the heavens. I always have. So have my people.”

  Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe. Grus said, “Whether that’s so or not, you are still going to pay for raiding our coasts. You don’t care for Avornis in the Chernagor country. We don’t like Chernagors plundering Avornis.”

  Again, Gleb started to speak. Grus could make a good guess about what he was going to say—something like, Well, what makes you any better than we are? But the answer to that was so obvious, Gleb again fell silent. An Avornan army camped outside of Jobuka gave Grus a potent argument. The Chernagor prince’s sour stare said he knew as much. Sullenly, he asked, “How much are you going to squeeze out of me?”

  Grus told him the same thing as he’d told Prince Lazutin. He wondered how Gleb would go about haggling. The only thing he was sure of was that Gleb would.

  Sure enough, the Prince of Jobuka exclaimed, “Letting you loose on the countryside would be cheaper!”

  “Well, that can be arranged, Your Highness,” Grus said with a bow. He called for Hirundo. When the general arrived, the king said, “If you’d be kind enough to give the orders turning our soldiers loose …”

  “Certainly, Your Majesty.” Hirundo turned to leave once more. Where Prince Gleb could see him, he was all brisk business.

  He’d taken only a couple of steps before Gleb said, “Wait!” Hirundo paused, looking back toward the king.

  “Why should he wait?” Grus asked. “You told us what your choice was, Your Highness. We’re willing to give you what you say you want. Carry on, Hirundo.”

  “Wait!” Gleb said again, more urgently—almost frantically—this time. Again, Hirundo paused. Grus waved him on. Prince Gleb threw his hands in the air. “Stop, curse you! I was wrong. I’d rather pay.”

  “The full sum?” Grus demanded. Now that he had Gleb over a barrel—one the Prince of Jobuka had brought out himself and then fallen over—he intended to take full advantage of it.

  “Yes, the full sum,” Gleb said. “Just leave the crops alone!”

  What did that say? That his storehouses were almost empty? Grus wouldn’t have been surprised. “Bring out the silver by this hour tomorrow,” the king told Gleb. “Otherwise …”

  “I understood you,” Gleb said sourly. “You don’t need to worry about that, Your Majesty. I understood you very well.”

  Having made the promise to pay, he kept it. Grus checked the silver even more closely than he had the money he’d gotten from Prince Lazutin. All of it proved good. He doubted any of the Chernagors would pay when he didn’t have an army at their doorstep, but he didn’t intend to lose a lot of sleep over it. He’d squeezed them plenty hard as things were. He left the encampment near the formidable walls of Jobuka and marched his army south.

  “Are we heading for home, Your Majesty?” Hirundo asked in some surprise. “I thought we’d pay a call on Hrvace, too.”

  “We will,” Grus said.

  “But …” Hirundo pointed west. “It’s that way.”

  “Thank you so very much,” Grus said, and the general winced. The king went on, “Before I turn west, I want to get Jobuka under the horizon. If Gleb sees me going that way, he’s liable to send a ship to Hrvace. It could get there before we do, and that could let Prince Tvorimir set up an ambush.”

  Hirundo bowed in the saddle. “Well, I can’t very well tell you you’re wrong, because you’re right. The only thing I will say is, Gleb’s liable to send that ship anyway. We ought to be ready for trouble.”

  “So we should,” Grus said. “I trust you’ll make sure we are?”

  “You’re a trusting soul, aren’t you?” the general replied.

  King Grus laughed out loud at that. Maybe some Kings of Avornis had been trusting souls. Lanius was a dedicated antiquarian. He might know of one or two. Grus couldn’t think of any. If a trusting soul had somehow mounted the Avornan throne, he wouldn’t have lasted long.

  Lanius knew he went to the archives like a lover to his beloved—the figure of speech Sosia had used held some truth. He would never have used it around her himself. It was too likely to stir up her suspicions.

  Working on How to Be a King gave him a perfect excuse for poking through ancient documents. He laughed at himself. Oh, yes, I really need an excuse to get dusty.

  He was looking for documents dealing with Thervingia during his father’s reign and the early years of his own—the days when King Dagipert had ruled the kingdom to the west, and when Dagipert had threatened to rule Avornis as well.

  For the moment, Lanius wrote, Avornans do not often think of Thervingia. It is a quiet, peaceful land, not one to cause trouble or alarm here. But this has not always been so, nor is there any guarantee that it shall always be so. Time may reveal Thervingia once more as a frightful danger. This being so, my beloved son, you should know as much as possible about the bygone days when Thervingia threatened our very dynasty.

  To Crex, those days would seem as distant as the time before the Menteshe seized the Scepter of Mercy. They were beyond his memory, and all times before one’s own memory ran together. But Lanius remembered them well, and hoped to give his son some hints about how to deal with Thervingia if it turned troublesome again.

  Knowing how to deal with the Thervings meant knowing how Avornis had dealt with them in days gone by. So Lanius told himself, anyhow. It gave him a splendid excuse for going through the archives and reading old parchments.

  How had his father and Grus dealt with Dagipert? Carefully, it seemed. Reading the letters Mergus and Grus and Arch-Hallow Bucco had exchanged with the King of Thervingia, it struck Lanius that Dagipert had had the upper hand more often than not. That wasn’t the way Lanius remembered things, but he’d been young and hadn’t been encouraged to worry about affairs of state. He’d assumed everything was all right, and in the end he hadn’t been wrong. But the road to the end had been rockier than he realized.

  He started to write advice for how to deal with the Thervings when they had
a strong king, then realized that was foolish. When Thervingia had a weak king, it wasn’t dangerous to Avornis. He was glad he’d avoided making a fresh muddle in the text. One of these days, a secretary would make a fair copy of this manuscript so Crex—and maybe others who came after Crex—could read it. Even without a new muddle, Lanius pitied that secretary. His own script was spidery, and the manuscript marred by scratch-outs, arrows sending what was written here to be placed there, words and sometimes sentences squeezed in between lines, and every other flaw that annoyed him when someone else committed it.

  After putting down on parchment what was, in his judgment, the best way to keep Thervingia from causing trouble, he read over what he had written. If someone who really faced trouble from the Thervings read this, would it do him any good? Lanius found himself shrugging. He really didn’t know. He didn’t suppose it would hurt. That would have to do.

  When he left the archives, he went to the moncats’ room. Several of the beasts came up to him in search of handouts. Like any cats, they liked him better when he had presents than when he didn’t. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t stop in the kitchens.”

  They kept sending him slit-eyed, reproachful stares. He perched on a stool and watched them. After a little while, they seemed to forget he was there, and went back to scrambling on their framework of boards and branches, to eating from the bowls of meat that were always there for them, and to snuggling up not far from the braziers that kept their chamber warm. They were less sensitive to cold than his mustachioed monkeys, but they still enjoyed the heat from the braziers. He paid more attention to the moncats than to the monkeys these days, probably because the moncats got into more mischief.

  He looked around for Pouncer. He at least half expected not to find the moncat. Would it be off in the kitchen stealing spoons, or had it gone off to the archives to hunt mice while he came here? But no, Pouncer lolled by a brazier, not quite asleep but not inclined to do much more than loll, either.

  “You are a nuisance,” Lanius told the moncat. “You’re worse than a nuisance—you’re a pest.”

  Praise of that sort seemed to be what Pouncer wanted most. The moncat rolled and stretched, all without going any farther from the warmth. Lanius laughed. Pouncer would be charming for as long as it cared to be, and not a heartbeat longer. Then it would go back to being a pest again.

  He watched Pouncer. Pouncer watched him. After watching for a while, Pouncer decided it didn’t want to stay by the brazier anymore. It scrambled up the framework of boards and branches Lanius had had made so the moncats could feel more as though they were living in the forest. Two other moncats higher up on the framework squared off against each other, snarling and hissing. As usually happened, one of them intimidated the other, which backed down. Sometimes, though, they would fight.

  When Lanius looked back to see what Pouncer was up to, he frowned and scratched his head. Where was the moncat? He couldn’t find it.

  He looked up and down the frame. He looked back toward the brazier. He looked all around the moncats’ chamber. Then, for good measure, he looked again. He rubbed his eyes and looked for a third time.

  Pouncer had disappeared.

  Lanius got up and examined the part of the frame where Pouncer had been the last time he paid any attention to the moncat. He also examined the wall behind the frame. It looked like the brickwork that made up much of the rest of the palace. As far as the king could tell, Pouncer might have dug a hole, jumped into it, and pulled the hole in after itself.

  How long did I take my eye off Pouncer to watch the other beasts? Lanius wondered. Half a minute? A minute? Maybe even a minute and a half? No more than that, surely. How far could an unwatched moncat go in, at most, a minute and a half?

  Far enough, evidently.

  “Cursed thing,” Lanius said. If he had been paying attention, he would finally have found out Pouncer’s secret. Instead, the moncat had outsmarted him. He could almost hear Bubulcus’ mocking voice. Which is hardly a surprise to anyone who knows them both, the servant would say.

  But Bubulcus was dead. Remembering that brought Lanius up as sharply as seeing—or rather, not seeing—Pouncer vanish. The servant had mocked once too often, and paid too high a price.

  Where was Pouncer now? Somewhere in the spaces between the walls, heading for—where? The kitchens? The archives? Someplace else, a spot known only to the moncat? How did the beast find its way in what had to be absolute darkness? Smell? Hearing? Touch?

  Those were all wonderful questions. Lanius had less trouble coming up with them than he’d had finding questions to answer for How to Be a King. He’d replied to those questions. These? No.

  Staying here until Pouncer reappeared might give him at least some of the answers he wanted so badly. Of course, the moncat, left to its own devices, might not come back for days—might not, in fact, come back at all. Put a servant in here to watch? Keep sending in servants in shifts until Pouncer returned? Lanius shook his head. Opening and closing the door so often would only give the rest of the moncats chances to escape. And how much attention would servants pay if they did come in and watch? Not enough, probably.

  What to do, then? Lanius let out a few soft curses, just enough to make some of the moncats look his way again. This was one of the rare times when he wished he took the field. He was convinced the curses of fighting soldiers had an unmatched sonorous magnificence.

  As things were, once he got done swearing the best thing he could think to do was leave the moncats’ room. Sooner or later, Pouncer would turn up somewhere. Then the beast would go back in here … and then, sooner or later, it would escape again.

  And maybe, with a little luck, I’ll get to see it escaping next time, Lanius thought.

  The road to Hrvace, the easternmost of the Chernagor city-states that had joined Nishevatz in harrying Avornis, would have been as good as any Grus had seen in the north country. He wouldn’t have had to worry about ambushes or anything else while traveling it. It would have been, if a driving rainstorm from off the Northern Sea hadn’t turned it into a bottomless ribbon of mud. As things were, horses sank to their bellies, wagons to their hubs or deeper. Moving forward at all became a desperate struggle. Moving forward in a hurry—the very idea was laughable.

  But Grus knew he had to move forward in a hurry if he wanted to punish Hrvace for what it had done. That same rain was ruining the last of the harvest hereabouts. Living off the land wouldn’t be easy. Living off the land would, in fact, be just as hard as moving forward in a hurry.

  “We have to,” Grus said.

  “Your Majesty, I don’t work miracles,” Hirundo replied, more than a little testily. “And if my horse goes down into the mud all the way to its nose so it drowns, I wont go forward one bit, let alone fast.”

  “You don’t work miracles,” Grus said. He raised his voice and shouted for Pterocles. The rain drowned his voice as effectively as mud would have drowned Hirundo’s horse. He shouted again, louder.

  Eventually, Pterocles heard him. Even more eventually, the wizard fought his way to the king’s side. “What do you need, Your Majesty?” Pterocles asked.

  Grus looked up into the weeping heavens, and got a faceful of rain for doing it. “Can you make this stop?” he inquired.

  Pterocles shook his head. Water dripped from the end of his nose and from his beard. “Not me, Your Majesty, and any other wizard who says he can is lying through his teeth. Wizards aren’t weatherworkers. Men aren’t strong enough to do anything about rain or wind or sun. The Banished One could, but I don’t suppose you’d want to ask him.”

  “No,” Grus said. “I don’t suppose I would. Is he aiming this weather at us, or is it just a storm?”

  “I think it’s just a storm,” Pterocles replied. “It doesn’t feel like anything but natural weather.”

  “All right,” Grus said, though it wasn’t. He murmured a prayer to the gods in the heavens. They surely had some control over the weather—if they chose to do anything abou
t it. But how interested in the material world were they? Natural or not, this rain helped nobody but the Banished One. Didn’t Olor and Quelea and the rest see as much?

  Regardless of what Olor and Quelea and the other gods in the heavens saw, the rain kept falling. It didn’t get lighter. If anything, it got worse. Grus kept the army moving west for as long as he could. But movement was at best a crawl. What should have taken a quarter of an hour took a quarter of a day.

  At last, Hirundo said, “Your Majesty, may I tell you something obvious?”

  “Go ahead,” Grus said.

  “Your Majesty, this is more trouble than it’s worth,” the general said. “Gods only know how long we’re going to need to get to Hrvace. Once we’re there, how are we going to feed ourselves? We won’t be able to live off the country, and supply wagons will have a demon of a time getting through. The Chernagors inside the walls will laugh their heads off when they see us.”

  He was right. King Grus knew that all too well. Even though he knew it, he resisted acting on what he knew. Angrily, he asked, “What do you want me to do? Turn around and go back to the city of Avornis?”

  Grus hoped that would make Hirundo say something like, No, of course not, Your Majesty. Instead, the general nodded emphatically. “Yes, that’s just what I want you to do,” he said. “If you ask me, it’s the only sensible thing we can do.”

  “But—” Grus still fought the idea. “If we do that, then the Banished One still has a toehold in the Chernagor country.”

  “Maybe,” Hirundo said. “But maybe not, too. Lazutin and Gleb swore up and down they didn’t have much to do with him—certainly not directly. We don’t really know he had a toehold anywhere but Nishevatz.”

  “Tempting to believe that,” Grus said. “I’m almost afraid to, though, just because it’s so tempting.”

  “Well, look at it this way,” Hirundo said. “Suppose we go on to Hrvace and sit outside it and get weaker and hungrier by the day. We can’t threaten to ravage the countryside, because the storm’s already done most of that. Suppose the Chernagors come out when they see how weak we are. Suppose they smash us. Don’t you think that would do the Banished One some good?”