The Scepter's Return

by Harry Turtledove

  “I wish you were,” Pterocles said.

  “In that case, it doesn’t make any difference,” Grus said. “If it can get me down here, it can get me up there, too. And if it gets me a little sooner down here than it would up there—well, so what?”

  He might have fought an ordinary outbreak of disease by ordering that no one south of the Stura should cross to the north side of the river. That might have slowed things down. For a plague in which he suspected the Banished One played a part … well, what was the point? The exiled god could make sure a diseased thrall came over the river, or might waft the illness across it some other way.

  And, even if Grus had given the order, it would have come too late. Less than an hour after Pterocles finally came out of the tub, a messenger ran up to the city governor’s residence shouting that two soldiers and a merchant by the waterfront had come down sick.

  People who heard the news gasped in horror. Some of them seemed ready to disappear as fast as they could. When people heard a pestilence was loose, they often did that—and they often brought it with them and spread it places where it wouldn’t have gone if they hadn’t. That was one more reason Grus couldn’t have hoped to hold the disease on the southern side of the Stura.

  He and Pterocles looked at each other. “Well, now we get the chance to find out what we’re up against,” Grus said, hoping he sounded more cheerful than he felt.

  “So we do.” Pterocles frowned. “You don’t have to do this, you know, Your Majesty. No one will call you a coward if you don’t.”

  “A coward?” Grus stared and then started to laugh. “I wasn’t worried about that. No, my thinking went in the other direction—if the Banished One wants me to come down with this disease, he’ll find a way to make me catch it. I don’t expect I can escape it just by staying away from the first few people we find who’ve come down with it.”

  “Oh.” Pterocles kept frowning, but the expression took on a slightly different shape. “Well, when you put it like that, you’re probably right. I wish I could tell you that you were wrong, but you’re probably right.”

  “Come on, then,” the king told him. “We’re only wasting time here.”

  The waterfront at Cumanus was a busy place, full of barges and boats that went up and down the river, and lately even more full of those that crossed the river and brought the Avornans on the far side whatever they chanced to need. It smelled of horses and wool and olive oil and spilled wine and puke and the cheap floral scents the barmaids and doxies splashed on themselves to draw customers and fight the other odors. Dogs scratched through rubbish. So did derelicts. Someone sang a syrupy love song and accompanied himself on the mandolin; the music floated out through the shutters of a second-story window.

  Normally, the dockside was where you could also hear the most inspired cursing in the kingdom. Riverboat men, longshoremen, the taverners and the wenches who served them, and the merchants who tried to diddle them were all folk of passion and vivid imagination. Back when Grus was a river-galley captain, he’d had to try to hold his own in such company, and it hadn’t been easy.

  Now, though, the wharves and the warehouses and whorehouses and inns and shops close by were, apart from that love song, quieter than they had any business being, quieter than the king had ever heard them. The few voices that did come to his ear were high and shrill and frightened. He was frightened, too, though he tried not to show it.

  The messenger who’d brought them down from the city governor’s castle pointed to a tavern. “They’re in there,” he said, “in a back room.” He showed no interest in going into the place himself.

  “Thanks.” No, Grus wasn’t falling over with eagerness to go inside, either. But this was what he’d come for. He dug into the pouch on his belt and handed the messenger a couple of pieces of silver. The man made them disappear—and then made himself disappear.

  Pterocles went into the tavern first, as though being a sorcerer guaranteed him more protection than it did Grus. Grus knew that wasn’t necessarily so, and Pterocles no doubt knew the same thing. The king followed close behind. The front room of the tavern, the room where people did their drinking, was empty. By all appearances, it had emptied in a hurry. Some stools were pushed back from tables. Others lay overturned on the rammed-earth floor. A lot of the cups of wine and ale on the tables were half full, several quite full. Some of them had been knocked over, too. Wine spilled across tabletops like blood, but smelled sweeter. A goose had been roasting over the fire in the hearth. It was one sadly burnt bird now.

  Grus pointed. “There’s the door to the back room.” It stood open. By the signs, someone must have led or dragged the sick people in there and then departed along with or just behind everybody else. That’s bound to help spread whatever this is, too, Grus through morosely.

  Again, Pterocles went in ahead of him. Again, Grus didn’t let the wizard lead by much. “Well, what have we got?” the king inquired.

  He needed a moment to adjust to the gloom in the back room. A little light came in through the open door, a little more through a small window set high in one wall. Stout iron bars made sure no one could climb in through that window. The taverner stored jars of wine and barrels of ale and salty crackers and smoked fish and pickled cucumbers and olives in brine and all the rest of his stock back there. The three men who’d been taken sick lay in the narrow space between a row of earthenware jars and another of barrels.

  Pterocles and Grus had just enough room to kneel beside them. Two were unconscious, barely breathing. The third, a soldier, twisted and muttered to himself in some dream of delirium. Pterocles set a hand on his forehead, then quickly jerked it back. “Fever?” Grus asked. There, he didn’t want to imitate the wizard.

  “High fever,” Pterocles answered, and wiped his palm on his breeches. Grus wasn’t sure he even knew he was doing it. He went on, “He’s burning up. And the rest—well, you can see for yourself.”

  “Yes,” Grus said, and said no more. Blisters branded all three sufferers’ faces and hands, and no doubt the parts of them that clothing concealed as well. Some of those blisters were still closed; others had broken open and were weeping a thick, yellowish fluid. Grus had to nerve himself to ask, “Have you ever seen the like? Have you ever heard of the like?”

  “No, Your Majesty, I’m afraid I haven’t,” Pterocles answered. “I’m not a physician, mind you. Maybe one of the healers here will be able to give this … illness a name.”

  “How much good will that do, even if someone can?” Grus asked.

  “I don’t know,” Pterocles said. “Healers and wizards go after disease in different ways. We see if magic can do anything against it. They try to treat it without sorcery. Sometimes we do better, sometimes they do, and sometimes nobody has much luck.”

  That struck Grus as honest, if less encouraging than he would have liked. One of the sick men let out a soft sigh and stopped breathing. A moment later, a latrine stench filled the tavern’s back room. His bowels had opened, as they usually did when men died.

  Grus said, “The other thing is, no physician in his right mind is going to want to come anywhere near this place.”

  “I think you’re wrong about that, Your Majesty,” Pterocles said. “Healers deal with sickness all the time—more than wizards do, as a matter of fact. They won’t let it faze them here.”

  “No, eh? It fazes me,” Grus said. “Can you tell anything about what this is and what to do about it?”

  “About what it is? It’s bad. It kills people,” Pterocles said. “I don’t need to be a wizard to know that, do I? About what to do about it? Not yet. I’ll have to do more tests, cast more spells.…”

  “How long will it take?” Grus asked. “I don’t think we’ve got very long.”

  There were times when Pterocles got so caught up in sorcerous theory that he lost sight of the real world, the world in which that theory had to operate. That would have irked Grus even more than it did if he hadn’t been such a good wizard. Now, t
hough, he understood exactly what his sovereign was telling him. Looking up at Grus, he said, “I don’t, either.”

  Left behind again, Lanius thought, not that he’d ever been eager to travel very far from the city of Avornis. He saw the progress of the plague through a series of dispatches. He’d watched the campaign south of the Stura the same way, and the campaign against the Chernagors before that.

  There was a difference this time, though. When couriers came with news of the war south of the Stura, Lanius hadn’t worried that they’d brought the war with them. Whenever a letter came up now, he wondered if the man carrying it would get sick two days later. He also wondered if he himself—and the other people in the palace—would get sick two days later.

  He did what he could to help. He was neither wizard nor physician, though he knew a little about both crafts. If he was anything besides a king, he was a scholar. He knew how to find out about things he didn’t already know. Maybe plagues like this one had gone through Avornis in years gone by. If the archives held records of a similar illness, they might also hold records of what the healers and wizards of days gone by had done about it.

  On the other hand, they might hold records that showed the healers and wizards of days gone by hadn’t been able to do anything about the illness. But if that were true, wouldn’t the pestilence have killed off everyone in the kingdom?

  Trying to find out gave him a new excuse to poke around in the archives. As he usually did before going there, he put on an old tunic and a pair of breeches that had seen better days. He forgot every once in a while, and had to put up with sarcastic remarks from the washerwomen. He supposed he didn’t have to put up with them. If something dreadful happened to the first servant who complained, the second one would think twice, or maybe more than twice. His father might have done something like that; by all accounts, King Mergus hadn’t put up with nonsense from anybody. But Lanius conspicuously lacked a taste for other people’s blood. He shrugged and went on to the archives in his shabby old clothes.

  He opened the door to the archives, then closed it behind him. As soon as he breathed in, the odor of dust and old paper and parchment and wood shelves and—very faintly—mouse droppings made him smile. It told him this was his place, the place where he belonged. The dusty, watery sunbeams sifting down from the skylights said the same thing.

  In an open space near the center of the big room, where the light was as good as it ever got, he had a table nobody else in the palace wanted, a stool, a bottle of ink, some pens, and paper for scribbling notes. He’d done a lot of writing when he was putting together that book on how to be a king for his son. The next interest Crex showed in it would be the first. The boy was still young. So Lanius told himself. He would have been interested in a book like that at Crex’s age, but even he knew he’d made an unusual boy. Crex was much more nearly normal. Most of the time, Lanius thought that was a good thing. Every once in a while, he wondered.

  Where to look for evidence of plague? Lanius guessed he would find it around the time when the Menteshe swarmed out of the south, took away that part of the Kingdom of Avornis, and carried off the Scepter of Mercy. A pestilence in Avornis would have helped those who served the Banished One. The exiled god would surely have been clever enough to realize as much, too.

  Lanius nodded to himself. That was one question answered. The next one, at least as important, was, where in the archives would those documents be hiding? Would they be here at all, for that matter? Those had been chaotic times. Not everything got written down. What did get written down didn’t always get stored.

  He had to try. He knew where a lot of papers and parchments from those times were. He didn’t recall seeing any records of an unusual pestilence in those documents, but he’d never gone looking for records like that, either. So many things had gone wrong for Avornis in those days, he might not have noticed a plague. In more peaceable, more stable times it would have seemed something noteworthy. Here? Here it would have been just one of those things.

  Reports of battles lost. Reports of towns taken by the enemy, towns abandoned by the Avornans. Reports of peasants butchered, of herds run off, of crops burned. The report of the loss of the Scepter of Mercy—that was one long cry of anguish all by itself. The archaic language only made it sound more pathetic.

  Plague? He didn’t see any report of plague, or nothing out of the ordinary. Disease would break out every now and then. Sometimes it got into the records, sometimes it didn’t.

  For a moment, he thought he was on to something. Avornans in the south reported a horrible new malady, one that … As he read more, he shook his head. This wasn’t what he was after. He realized what they were seeing—they were seeing thralls for the first time. They didn’t quite understand what the Menteshe wizards had done to peasants down there. Even if they had understood, how much difference would it have made? No one had been able to do anything about thralldom until Pterocles came along.

  Lanius went on searching. Every once in a while, his instincts—and the archives—let him down badly. Grus, of course, didn’t know what he was doing here. He wouldn’t have to be too embarrassed if he didn’t come up with anything. But the other king had come to know him and know the way he thought alarmingly well over the years. Grus understood that whenever something unusual came up, Lanius’ first reaction was to go into the archives and see what other kings had done when something like it happened in distant days.

  That was only sensible, at least to Lanius. Sometimes he found things interesting enough to make Grus agree with him, or at least keep quiet about disagreeing. Whenever he came up empty, he heard Grus laughing at him—or, at least, he imagined he did.

  He discovered it was too dark to go on working when he couldn’t read the documents he was sorting through anymore. He looked up toward the skylights and discovered no light to speak of was coming through them. As though a spell were wearing off, he realized he was hungry and thirsty and desperately needed to ease himself.

  He almost tripped three or four times going to the door. Yes, walking around in the dark will do that, he told himself, feeling foolish. He made it out with a sigh of relief, and hurried to the nearest garderobe with another. Feeling better, he walked back to the royal quarters.

  Sosia was already eating supper. The servants scrambled to get some for Lanius. “Why didn’t you wait?” he asked. “Why didn’t someone call me?”

  She set down the lamb shank she’d been gnawing. “You are joking, aren’t you?” she said. “You know it’s worth anyone’s life to try to pry you out of the archives. If you hadn’t come out until tomorrow night, we would have started worrying.”

  Lanius laughed. Then he realized she’d meant it. He wanted to laugh again, this time at himself. Somehow, though, he knew his wife would not find it funny. In a small voice, he asked, “Am I really as bad as that?”

  “Maybe not quite,” Sosia answered. “Maybe we would have started worrying tomorrow afternoon.”

  This time, Lanius choked off the laugh before it passed his lips. He waited for the servants to bring him a lamb shank and buttered parsnips and bread of his own.

  Sosia toyed with a piece of honey cake topped with chopped walnuts so she could stay at the table while he ate. She asked, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “No,” Lanius said around a mouthful of parsnips. “I found the documents from what I think is the right time, but I haven’t come across any that talk about a pestilence. Maybe I haven’t uncovered them yet, or maybe I need to be looking earlier or later.”

  “Maybe you should try the temple archives,” Sosia said. “When people take sick, they ask priests to pray for them. They think they have a better chance with priests than with doctors or wizards, and a lot of the time they’re right.”

  Lanius got up, hurried around the table, and kissed her. The honey swirled through the cake made her lips sticky and sweet. Right then, he would have kissed her if she’d been gnawing cloves of garlic. “The very thing!” he
exclaimed. “I’ll do it first thing in the morning. I wish old Ixoreus were still alive. He would know exactly where to look.” But the ancient archivist had died several years earlier. His successor wasn’t fit to stand in his shadow. Lanius would have to do his own searching. Maybe he would come up with something, though.

  Sosia smiled at him. “Some wives get kissed for telling their husbands what big, strong, handsome fellows they are. I get kissed for telling you which dusty old papers to go burrowing through.”

  “Are you complaining?” Lanius asked.

  “Oh, no,” she answered quickly. She might have reflected that, if he wasn’t kissing her for whatever reason, he was all too likely to be kissing a serving girl instead.

  After Lanius finished his supper, they went back to the bedchamber together. Maybe he was still in a good mood because of her suggestion. Maybe the extra cup or two of wine he’d drunk had something to do with things, too. Whatever the reason, their lovemaking had none of the wariness, none of the tension, it had often seen of late—when they’d been making love with each other at all.

  She did him an uncommonly large favor at the end, though he never knew it. She didn’t say anything like, Why can’t it be like this all the time? She let him go to sleep with a smile on his face, and she went to sleep with one on hers, too.

  Accompanied by royal guardsmen, the king walked over to the great cathedral the next morning. The guards weren’t likely to do him much good with what really worried him—if the plague came to the city of Avornis, chainmail and spears and swords wouldn’t hold it away. When Lanius went inside, he found Anser not far from the altar. He didn’t think Anser had been praying. He thought Grus’ bastard son had been playing a little catch with a green-robed priest. The young cleric hastily tucked away what Lanius was almost sure was a ball.

  “Hello, Your Majesty,” Anser said cheerfully. Whatever he’d been doing, it didn’t embarrass him. “Always good to see you. Do you need me for something, or are you going to dive into the archives?”