The Scepter's Return

by Harry Turtledove

  “Someone will need to keep it going.” Pterocles shouted, and kept shouting until another wizard came up. That took longer than Grus thought it should have; Pterocles didn’t seem to be the only absentminded sorcerer who’d come south of the Stura. But Pterocles bowed when the other wizard was in place. “I am at your service, Your Majesty.”

  “Come on, then.” Grus picked up a shield some foot soldier had forgotten. He tossed it to Pterocles, who caught it awkwardly. “Here. I expect you’ll want this.”

  By the expression on Pterocles’ face, he’d never grabbed anything he wanted less. But, under Grus’ stern eye, he didn’t let go. Grus commandeered a shield for himself a moment later. Well before they got back to the outer palisade, arrows started coming down not far away from them. “Oh,” Pterocles said in what sounded like real surprise. “Now I understand.”

  “I’m so glad,” Grus said. The look the sorcerer sent him was distinctly wounded. But he yelped like a puppy with a stepped-on tail when an arrow thudded into his shield. It might have gone by harmlessly had he not carried the round, bronze-faced wooden disk. On the other hand, it might not have. Grus gave back a sardonic nod. “You see?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, yes,” Pterocles replied in an unusually small voice.

  Hirundo pointed out toward the Menteshe. “So far, they’re just riding around shooting at us. They won’t do us much harm that way. We’ve hit a few of them, too, though their bows shoot farther than ours. But we’ll start using the dart-throwers and stone-throwers on ’em any minute. By Olor’s mighty fist, they can’t outrange those, and I don’t think they’ll like ’em very much.”

  He proved a good prophet. The engines began to buck and snap, sending their missiles farther and faster than any arrow could fly. A dart could pin a nomad’s leg to his horse, or go right through him and pierce the man behind him. A twenty-pound stone ball would mash a man’s head, or a horse’s, to red rags. In moving out of range of such weapons, the Menteshe also moved out beyond their own ability to strike at the Avornans.

  “If they want to give us trouble, they’ll have to close with us.” Hirundo sounded somberly satisfied. “Otherwise, they can ride and whoop and holler as much as they please, but they’re just a bunch of nuisances.”

  Before Grus could answer, cries of alarm rose from the inner palisade. “A sally! A sally!” The king caught the news through the general din.

  Menteshe were pouring out of the gates of Trabzun and swarming toward the palisade. Their guttural war cries filled the air. “Hold them!” Grus shouted to the men on the inner ring. “Don’t let them get over!”

  “Now we see how smart they are and how smooth they are. Can they hit us from inside and outside at the same time?” Hirundo might have been a scholar curious to see what someone else’s students knew about his specialty.

  Grus admired that detachment without wanting to imitate it. “If they can get over from inside and outside at the same time, we’re in trouble,” he said.

  “There is that,” Hirundo agreed. “We just have to make sure they can’t, then, don’t we?”

  “Would be nice,” Grus said. Hirundo laughed merrily, as though they were a pair of tradesmen bantering back and forth in front of their shops. And so they were, but at the moment their trade involved bloodshed and slaughter. As though to underscore the point, an arrow thrummed past Grus’ head. He jerked up his shield. That would have done him no good at all if the arrow had been a little better aimed.

  He trotted toward the inner palisade, drawing his sword as he did. “It’s the king!” Avornan soldiers called to one another. “The king is coming to help us!”

  Grus laughed almost as hard as Hirundo had a moment earlier. He would fight if he had to. He hadn’t been a bad swordsman when he was half his present age. He still knew what to do with a blade. His body, though, was less willing—no, less able—to do it than it had been thirty years before.

  Pikemen, archers, and swordsmen were holding back the garrison of Trabzun. The ditch in front of the palisade also helped. Some of the Menteshe leaped down into it and then tried to scramble up over the palisade and into the Avornans’ ring around their city. Most of them got shot or stabbed before they even came close to the top.

  Grus had always thought that the Avornans knew more about attacking works than the nomads did. The Menteshe hadn’t proved good at taking walled towns in southern Avornis during their last invasion. They’d destroyed crops around them and tried to starve them into submission. The few times they’d tried to storm them, they’d failed, and paid heavily for their failure.

  Here, though, they knew what to do about the ditch—or some of them did. They threw brush hurdles into it and ran across those before the Avornans could set them on fire. Then they started trying to boost one another over the palisade. They had a much better chance of managing that from the hurdles than they did from the bottom of the ditch.

  Now they could strike back at the Avornans. One of Grus’ men fell, his face a gory mask from the sword stroke that had laid him low. A Menteshe scrambled over the palisade and inside. Several Avornans rushed at him. He went down before any other nomads could join him.

  Even so, shouts from all around the inner ring warned that this wasn’t the only place where the Menteshe were using those bound piles of brush to span the ditch. More cries rose from behind Grus. That could only mean the horsemen outside the ring were trying to break in, too. He wondered whether they’d also brought brushwood with them. I’ll find out, he thought.

  Meanwhile, more Menteshe made it over the inner palisade. Knots of cursing, shouting men battled one another. A nomad broke out of the nearest knot and rushed at Grus.

  The nomad cut at his head. He blocked the blow. Sparks flew as iron belled off iron. The Menteshe slashed again. He had no style, but what seemed like endless youth and vigor. That might suffice, and Grus knew it.

  Then another Avornan ran at the nomad. The Menteshe’s face twisted in anger and fear. He didn’t fancy facing two at once. He had no choice, though. Figuring—no doubt accurately—the young soldier was more dangerous than the frost-bearded king, he gave more of his attention to the new foe.

  He likely would have beaten Grus without much trouble had they faced each other with no interference from other fighters. But he couldn’t fend off the king with only a third or a quarter of his aim focused on him. Grus’ sword went home below the nomad’s right arm, a spot the fellow’s boiled-leather corselet didn’t protect. The Menteshe howled like a wolf. The pain of the wound distracted him, and the other Avornan’s sword bit into his neck. He swayed, blood spurting from the wound, and then crumpled.

  “We make a good team, Your Majesty,” the Avornan soldier said.

  “So we do,” Grus replied. “Tell me your name.”

  “I’m called Esacus, Your Majesty.”

  “Esacus,” Grus repeated, fixing the name in his mind. “Well, Esacus, you’ll have a reward when all this is done.”

  “Thank you very much, but I didn’t do it for that,” the soldier said.

  “Which makes you more deserving, not less,” Grus told him. Esacus scratched his head, plainly not understanding. That proved he’d never had anything to do with the royal court. People there were apt to act much more heroic if they thought the king’s eye was on them than they might have otherwise.

  “You stay back, Your Majesty,” Esacus called as more Menteshe made it over the palisade. Shouting, “Avornis!” the soldier rushed into the fight.

  Grus did stay back. He knew good advice when he heard it. The Menteshe couldn’t get enough men within the Avornan ring at the same time to give the defenders too much trouble.

  The nomads were also trying to break into the palisaded ring from the outside. Despite the barrage of arrows they rained on the defenders, they weren’t having much luck. They must have hoped that barrage would break the Avornans, which would give them the chance they needed to force an entry. Unlike the Menteshe inside Trabzun, the reli
ef force hadn’t brought any hurdles or other ways to cross the ditch and come to grips with Grus’ men at close quarters.

  They were brave. Like anything else, bravery didn’t matter so much without the talent that would have supported it. If anything, it made the nomads take heavier losses than they would have with less courage. They kept on attacking even when the attacks couldn’t succeed—and they paid for it.

  At last, they had taken as much as they could take. They gave up trying to force their way into the ring. A few at a time, they began to ride off. Some lingered to keep on shooting at the Avornans from beyond the range where Grus’ archers could respond. Then a stone flung from an engine knocked a chieftain out of the saddle—and knocked over his horse, too. After that, the nomads seemed to decide they’d had enough. The men who’d lingered rode away after their comrades.

  Grus ordered some of the Avornans from the outer works to go to the aid of the men who were fighting off the much more stubborn attack on the inner ones. When the Menteshe trying to break out of Trabzun saw that the Avornans battling them were being reinforced, they sullenly drew back into the city—those who could, at any rate.

  Later, the king realized he should have tried to force an entry then. The Menteshe were in disarray, and the gates had to stay open for a while to let them back within the walls. But the nomads, though they hadn’t won, had fought well—well enough to rock the Avornans back on their heels. Grus did not issue the order. Neither did Hirundo. No one pursued the Menteshe as they retreated.

  What Grus did do as the fighting eased was let out a long sigh of relief and stab his sword into the soil to clean the blood off the blade. He sent runners out to find Hirundo and bring him back. The general nodded as he came up. “Well, Your Majesty, we got through that one,” he said.

  “I was thinking the same thing.” Grus spotted Pterocles and waved to him. “Is the mine still masked from the Menteshe? I hope none of them stumbled down the hole when they broke in. And I hope the wizard you set there didn’t run away from his post when that happened.”

  “I’ll go find out,” Pterocles said, which was exactly what Grus wanted to hear from him. The wizard hurried away.

  “We can always start the undermining again somewhere else if things did get buggered up,” Hirundo said.

  “I know. But we would have wasted a lot of time and a lot of work,” the king replied. “And if the Menteshe know we’re trying to dig under the wall, they’ll countermine to keep us away.” He snapped his fingers. “Which reminds me—we have to bring in the hurdles the nomads used to cross the inner ditch.”

  “I should hope so. If we don’t, they’re liable to sneak out at night and see if they can slit our throats while we’re sleeping,” Hirundo said.

  “Well, yes, that, too,” Grus said. Hirundo gave him a puzzled look. He explained what he had in mind.

  Hirundo heard him out and then bowed. “That’s very nice, Your Majesty. Very fitting, you might say. I’ll give the orders right away.” As Pterocles had a few minutes earlier, he bustled off to tend to what needed doing.

  The wizard returned at a trot, the smile on Pterocles’ face telling Grus what he needed to know even before the wizard said, “All’s very well, Your Majesty. No trouble came too close to Calidris, and he kept the spell going all through the fight. The Menteshe in Trabzun don’t know what we’re up to.”

  “Ah.” Grus smiled, too. His was a more wolfish expression than the one the wizard wore. “Then that work will go on. How much longer till we’re under Trabzun’s walls? Do you happen to know?”

  Pterocles shook his head. “I spoke to the sorcerer, not to the minemaster.”

  “Too bad,” Grus said. “We’ll go on till we finish, that’s all.” He looked south, toward Yozgat. “Yes, we’ll go on till we finish.”

  King Lanius looked up toward the skylight set into the roof above the royal archives. Dusty sunbeams filtered down to where he sat. No one had ever been able to get those skylights clean. Lanius suspected much of the dirt was on the inside of the glass, and thereby inaccessible. The only way to be rid of it would be to take out the panes and replace them with clean ones.

  A faint skittering noise came from somewhere in the bowels of the archives. Lanius sighed. He knew mice got in here. The only thing he didn’t know was how many precious parchments they’d chewed up before he ever got the chance to see them.

  Grus had written that he was besieging Trabzun, formerly Trapezus. Avornis hadn’t owned the city for centuries. Even so, the archives held papers and parchments about the city and what it had been like in bygone days—tax records, reports on the state of the walls, appeals to lawsuits that had gone all the way to the city of Avornis. Lanius had run into them from time to time when he was looking for other things, sometimes when he was looking for nothing in particular.

  He’d run into them, yes, but he hadn’t thought anything about it. Why should he have? The Kingdom of Avornis had lost more than a few cities in the Menteshe invasions. Quite a few of them, these days, were only ruins. The one that really impinged on Avornan consciousness was Yozgat, and that more because it held the Scepter of Mercy than for any other reason.

  Lanius shook his head. The road to Yozgat ran through Trabzun, and he had to think about Trabzun now.

  Dust rose in choking clouds when the king pulled a crate off a shelf. Coughing, he carried the crate to a table. He thought he remembered finding papers from Trabzun—or rather, from Trapezus—in it. As he pulled out documents and started reading them, he happened to look down at himself. His tunic, though old, had been clean when he put it on. Now dust and dirt streaked and spotted it. He tried to brush off some of the dust with his hands, and raised a small cloud around himself without getting the tunic much cleaner.

  The king began to wonder whether he knew what he was talking about. The crate didn’t seem to have any of the documents he was looking for. Were they really somewhere else? Was he misremembering? He’d done that when he was looking for papers from Yozgat. Once could happen to anybody. Twice? Didn’t twice suggest his memory wasn’t as good as he thought it was? For a man who prided himself on his wits—not least because he didn’t have a whole lot of other things on which to pride himself—that was a disheartening notion.

  “Ha!” he exclaimed as he got near the bottom of the crate. There they were! He’d buried them under other documents that had seemed more interesting the last time he went through them.

  Tax registers from Trapezus wouldn’t do Grus any good. The people who’d dutifully paid those taxes (or not so dutifully tried to evade them) were hundreds of years dead. Their descendants, if they had any, were probably thralls. But …

  “Ha!” Lanius said again, and plucked a parchment from the crate. Here was a map of Trapezus long ago, showing which of those taxpayers—recalcitrant or otherwise—owned which properties in the city. Again, those property owners were ashes for a very long time. Many of the buildings were bound to have fallen down between then and now. Odds were, though, that the streets still ran as they had in those far-off days, which meant Grus might find the map worth having.

  Lanius sighed once more. Part of him still resented working for the man who’d stolen half his throne and far more than half his power. But he couldn’t deny, however much he wanted to, that Grus had done a good job with that power. If, say, Ortalis had been the usurper … Lanius shook his head. No, he didn’t want to think about that.

  Below the map lay a report from an officer in Trapezus on the walls, and on repairs that had been made after an earthquake. Lanius decided to send that along, too. Maybe there had been more earthquakes since, but it might prove useful.

  He was sure Grus would be interested in some of the things he’d found out about Yozgat. He would tell his father-in-law about those when Grus got back to the city of Avornis. He didn’t want to put them in writing. They would have to travel a long way south of the Stura before they got to Grus. Lanius knew Menteshe raiders bedeviled the route by which supplies a
nd letters went down to the Avornan army. If he went into too much detail and the dispatch happened to be captured—that wouldn’t be good at all.

  And it could end up a lot worse than merely no good at all. A captured dispatch from one King of Avornis to the other might end up in the Banished One’s hands. That would do for a catastrophe until a more emphatic word came along. If the Banished One suspected any of what Lanius had in mind, all his carefully laid plans would fall to pieces then and there.

  He heard another skittering noise and looked up, hoping it was Pouncer. But no moncat came out hoping for a treat. Just another mouse, he thought. He’d tried setting traps in the archives, traps that would smash any mouse taking the bait. The next dead mouse he saw in any of them would be the first. He had almost smashed his own foot in one; only a hasty backward leap saved him. After that, he took out the traps.

  Thinking of that fiasco made him start to laugh. What if he’d forgotten one and left it here? How long would it be before some other king—or perhaps some scholar—prowled through the archives the way he liked to do? A hundred years from now, or two hundred, would the man who went through the archives have any idea the trap that had smashed his foot was set by a King of Avornis? Lanius didn’t see how he could.

  Sosia gave him a peculiar look when he told her about the thought later that day. “You find the oddest things to worry about,” she said.

  “I wasn’t worried. I just thought it was … interesting,” Lanius said.

  “Interesting!” His wife snorted. “Who in the world could care about what happens a hundred years from now?”

  The Banished One could, Lanius thought. But he didn’t want to be compared to the exiled god, and the Banished One wasn’t in the world willingly. There was another answer he could give her, though. “I do. The dynasty reaches back further than that. I’d like to see it reach forward further than that, too.” He pointed a finger at her. “Wouldn’t you? You’re part of the dynasty yourself, you know.”