The Scepter's Return

by Harry Turtledove

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Lanius was not sorry to come back to the city of Avornis, even though he’d enjoyed himself out in the country. Collurio and Pouncer stayed a while longer, working on what the moncat had to learn. The trainer seemed perfectly happy to remain. He’d gotten friendly with a washerwoman and his son had gotten friendly with her daughter, a neat arrangement that satisfied everyone except, perhaps, Collurio’s wife.

  As for the king, he was glad to return to the archives and the other moncats—even if they were neither as clever nor as exasperating as Pouncer. Returning to Sosia and his own children was pleasant, too, though he took longer to realize it. He did have the sense not to tell anyone, especially his own wife, that he took longer to realize it.

  He also returned to a good deal of the petty business that surrounded a king, which for him was much less pleasant. He wished Grus were around to take care of it, but Grus, beginning a new campaign in the Menteshe country, had more urgent things to worry about. Appeals from lawsuits and from criminal cases did not appeal to Lanius. He had to take care of them, though; that was one of the things a king was for.

  A report came in from a seaside province of a series of robberies and rapes and one murder committed by a man missing his left ear. Lanius remembered the luckless fellow the year before who’d claimed a one-eared man had done the killing for which he was blamed. Lanius hadn’t taken that appeal any more seriously than the others who’d reviewed it, and the man was dead now.

  “I’m afraid I made a mistake,” the king said to Sosia at supper that evening.

  “You?” His wife raised an eyebrow. “I don’t remember the last time you said that—and sounded like you meant it.” He winced. He’d called several of his affairs with serving girls mistakes. Somehow, that hadn’t convinced Sosia. She went on, “What happened this time?”

  He explained, finishing, “A man is dead on account of me.” He felt as though he were Ortalis at the hunt—except Ortalis enjoyed killing.

  “It sounds like you did make a mistake,” Sosia agreed, which made him feel no better. But then she said, “I don’t see how you can blame yourself for it. I wouldn’t have believed a story about a one-eared man, either. And you’re sorry now, aren’t you?”

  “I certainly am!” Lanius said. “I don’t want someone dying who shouldn’t have. That’s not what a king’s supposed to do.”

  “Too late to worry about it now,” Sosia said. “It can happen once in a while, that’s all. As long as you’re not laughing about it, I think you’re all right. You do try hard to make sure you don’t make mistakes very often—gods know that’s so. And I think you do pretty well at it. So remember you were wrong, yes, but don’t have nightmares about it.”

  Lanius’ nightmares were of a different sort, and from a different source. But he nodded his thanks at Sosia’s brisk, practical advice. “You sound a lot like your father—do you know that?” he said.

  “Do I?” Sosia thought about it. Then she nodded, too. “Well, maybe I do, some. Is that such a surprise? He raised me—when he wasn’t out on one of the Nine Rivers, anyhow.” Her mouth twisted. Lanius thought he knew why, and didn’t ask to find out if he was right. One of the things Grus had done while he was out on one of the Nine Rivers was father her bastard half brother, the current Arch-Hallow of Avornis.

  What Lanius did say was, “I meant it as a compliment. Your father is a shrewd man. Nobody would say anything else.” Not even he could say anything else, and he was the man whose crown Grus had … not stolen, since he still wore it, but brushed aside.

  “Do you think he can bring the Scepter of Mercy back from the south?” Sosia asked.

  That surprised Lanius; she seldom asked about affairs of state. “I hope he can,” the king said after a brief pause. “He has a better chance than any other King of Avornis since we lost the Scepter all those years ago. I’m doing everything I can to help him.”

  “You haven’t been in the archives so much lately,” Sosia said. “You’ve been fooling around with your moncats instead. You can’t tell me they’ve got anything to do with getting the Scepter of Mercy back.” By her tone, she was as sure of that as she was that he couldn’t give her any sort of good explanation for his fooling around with maidservants.

  If he tried to tell her anything different, he’d just end up with an argument on his hands. He didn’t want any arguments. Getting away from the palace had meant getting away from them. Even when Sosia came to check on him, they hadn’t quarreled. He hadn’t given her anything to quarrel about. He just shrugged and said, “I enjoy seeing what Pouncer can learn.”

  “Well …” Sosia paused. Lanius waited for her to say something rude about how useless or how foolish that was, but she didn’t. When she resumed, what came out was a grudging, “It’s better than some hobbies you could have, I suppose.”

  Better than seducing serving girls, she doubtless meant. And she had a point. Training Pouncer was certainly more challenging than pursuing maidservants, many of whom hardly required seducing. Going after the serving girls, though, was more fun. Lanius kept that opinion to himself.

  Even keeping it to himself didn’t help. Sosia wagged a finger at him and said, “I know what you’re thinking, you wicked wretch.” She tried to sound angry and severe, and—almost—succeeded.

  “You can’t prove a thing.” Lanius tried to sound naïve and innocent. He—almost—succeeded, too. They both started laughing. It was the first time they’d ever done that when they were talking about his going after other women. He hoped it meant Sosia wasn’t angry at him anymore. That was probably too much to expect, though. Maybe she wasn’t very angry.…

  Grus never got tired of watching wizards free thralls. The beauty of the spell drew him. The rainbows that swirled around the heads of men and women lost to themselves, lost in darkness, would have been enough by themselves to attract his eye. But the look on the thralls’ faces when the darkness fell away like a discarded cloak and they were thralls no more—that, to him, eclipsed even the rainbows.

  The Avornan wizards he’d taken south of the Stura never seemed to tire of casting the liberation spell, either. Even the bumblers and the bunglers among them came away smiling when they succeeded—and constant practice meant even they got the spell down pat and succeeded almost all the time.

  “They’re so grateful, Your Majesty,” one of the wizards said after a woman who would have been pretty were she cleaned and combed kissed him as soon as she came fully into herself.

  “I’ve seen that, yes,” Grus said. By the smoky looks the woman sent the sorcerer, she would have been glad to go on from kisses. Grus didn’t think taking advantage of women who didn’t yet fully know their own minds was sporting. He suspected not all the Avornan wizards and soldiers were so scrupulous. They were men (and most of them were much younger than he was), they were a long way from home, and they had … admirers. He hoped not too much trouble would spring from that.

  “I know me!” the newly freed thrall exclaimed. She pointed to her well-rounded chest. “I know me!” She kissed the wizard again. “Thank, thank, thank!” Like most of her kind, she didn’t have a lot of words, but she made the most of the ones she did have—and she would soon start picking up wagonloads of new ones.

  “You’re welcome, sweetheart,” the wizard murmured. The glance he sent Grus said he wished the king were busy doing something, anything, else. Maybe he didn’t care how grimy the girl was.

  Grus hadn’t issued any orders about fraternizing with freed thralls. He saw no point to giving orders he couldn’t enforce. That being so, he took himself elsewhere.

  The village was the same sort of tumbledown ruin as all the other thralls’ villages he’d seen on this side of the Stura. Some of the houses looked as though they hadn’t been repaired since the days before the Menteshe took this land away from Avornis. Some of them looked as though their roofs hadn’t been thatched since those days. That had to be an exaggeration … Grus supposed.

 
Scrawny chickens scuttled through the narrow, filth-clogged streets. An even scrawnier dog yapped around a corner from Grus. Ordinary Avornan peasants would have hanged themselves for shame over the way livestock here was treated—not because ordinary peasants particularly loved their animals (they didn’t) but because treating the beasts so badly meant they yielded less than they would have with a little more effort turned their way.

  As Grus got upwind of the village, he shook his head. That wasn’t right. It wouldn’t have taken more effort to do right by the animals—indeed, to do right by the whole village. It would have taken a little more attention. By the nature of what the dark sorcery did to thralls, though, attention was the last thing they could give.

  Royal guardsmen bowed to Grus as he came up. Pterocles and Otus were talking outside the wizard’s tent, which had gone up next to the bigger and grander royal pavilion. Pterocles waved to Grus. The king waved back and ambled over. The breeze chose that moment to shift, blowing the stink from the village over the encampment. Grus made a face. “How does anybody stand living with a stench like that?” he asked.

  “Your Majesty, I didn’t even notice it when I was a thrall,” Otus said. “It was just part of the air I breathed.”

  “A nasty part,” Grus said.

  Otus nodded gravely. “I think so, too—now. In those days, I didn’t think about it any more than a dog thinks about rough ground under its feet.”

  Grus remembered the dog he’d heard in the village. With all the bad smells, the poor beast had to be in torment—or else, thinking about the way some dogs liked to roll in filth, it was having the time of its life.

  Pterocles said, “Otus has asked me to teach him his letters. I’m glad to do it.”

  “I’m sure you would be,” Grus said, and then turned toward the freed thrall. “Why do you want to learn them? Most men born free can’t read and write, you know.” There had been Kings of Avornis who needed to use a stencil to sign their names to decrees. Not all of them were bad kings, either.

  “Fulca is a long way away now,” Otus said. “We can’t talk anymore. If I am going to say anything to her, I have to say it with words I write down. Someone back at the palace will read them to her. She will say what she wants to answer, and someone will write it down.”

  He didn’t want to dictate a letter. That gave Grus an idea. “Maybe Fulca will learn her letters, too,” he said.

  Otus looked startled. Then he nodded, a nod that was almost a bow. “You’re right, Your Majesty. Maybe she will. Learning things is good. I’ve seen that ever since I found out I could.”

  “I’m glad,” Grus said. “I hope all the thralls will be like you and turn into ordinary people as soon as they can.”

  “So do I,” Otus said. “The other king told me learning as much as I could was the most important thing I could do.”

  “Did he?” Grus said. Otus solemnly nodded. Grus hid a smile. Lanius was a born scholar, so of course he thought that way. Grus wasn’t sure Lanius was wrong, but he wouldn’t have put it as strongly as the other king had.

  “Freeing all the thralls will take a lot of wizardry,” Pterocles said. “We haven’t come close to doing it, not yet. We won’t for quite a while, either, even if we win all the fights.”

  He was bound to be right about that, and he was wise to be cautious. What he said wasn’t what Grus wanted to hear; the king wished everything were going smoothly, and that all the thralls would be free by day after tomorrow at the latest.

  What he got two days later wasn’t the freeing of all the thralls south of the Stura. Scouts came galloping back to the army from the south and southeast, shouting, “The Menteshe! The Menteshe are coming!”

  “Well, well,” Hirundo said. “Maybe this is what we get for telling the Banished One’s ambassador where to head in.”

  “Maybe it is,” Grus said. “But I’d rather fight the nomads out in the open than have them stand siege in Yozgat.”

  “A point,” Hirundo agreed. He shouted to the trumpeters. Horn calls blared out. The Avornans started shifting from columns into line of battle. Hirundo and Grus both shouted for them to hurry. If the Menteshe were moving forward as aggressively as that, the army needed to be ready when they got there. An attack before the Avornans were fully deployed was only too likely to turn into a disaster.

  Hirundo also shouted for the engineers to get the stone- and dart-throwing engines into place as fast as they could. Grus echoed that cry, too. The engines could do what Avornan archery couldn’t—they could outrange the nomads’ fearsome horn-backed bows. If the Menteshe wanted to make the fight nothing but an archery duel, they would pay for it.

  “Are these Korkut’s men, or are they Sanjar’s?” Grus asked a scout.

  “I’m sorry, Your Majesty,” the man answered. “They just look like a bunch of howling barbarians to me.”

  Grus laughed in spite of himself. “Well, by the gods in the heavens, we’ll give them something to howl about, won’t we?”

  More scouts began falling back on the main body of the army. Some of them were wounded, and either lurched in the saddle or rode behind men who hadn’t been hurt. Some, no doubt, wouldn’t make it back at all.

  Hirundo pointed ahead. “Here come the Menteshe.”

  “There are enough of them, aren’t there?” Grus said.

  “Too many, if anybody wants to know what I think,” the general replied.

  The plainsmen shouted something, but Grus couldn’t make out what it was. He shrugged. They were unlikely to be welcoming him to the lands south of the Zabat. He did some shouting of his own. He and Hirundo both noted a hillock on their left flank, and posted a sizable detachment of archers and lancers there. That would make a good anchor for the left wing. On the right, the ground was far less generous. To make sure the Avornans didn’t get outflanked there, Hirundo sent over a large fraction of the catapults. The great darts and flying stones would—with luck—keep the Menteshe from getting too adventurous over there.

  “Nicely done,” Grus said. “If they have to come straight at us, it’s our kind of fight.”

  “That’s what I’m hoping for, Your Majesty,” the general agreed. “The only thing wrong with the scheme is, the cursed Menteshe are liable to have hopes of their own.” He clucked in indignation that the nomads should presume to do anything so impolite.

  Grus looked around to the royal guardsmen, who waited behind a screen of archers and other men more lightly armed and armored. If the Menteshe tried to smash through the Avornan center, they would get the same sort of unpleasant greeting as they had the last time they fought a large battle against Grus’ army. Grus wondered whether any of the Menteshe commanders here had fought his men the summer before. That was something he wished he knew. It would have made a difference in his own dispositions.

  Arrows began to fly. The first ones fell short, as happened in almost every battle Grus had ever seen. Men got more excited than they should have. They thought the enemy was closer than he really was, or thought they were stronger than they really were. Those wasted arrows mattered little. Soon enough, the shafts would bite.

  And, soon enough, they did bite. Hit horses screamed. So did wounded men. Others crumpled to the ground without so much as a last sigh, dead before they struck it. In a way, they were the lucky ones. A quick death without pain was hardly more common on the battlefield than it was in the humdrum world of everyday life.

  Hirundo bawled orders, shifting men to the right to cover what looked like building trouble there. The trumpeters’ horn calls sent those orders winging even farther than his battle-trained voice could have. One of the trumpeters took an arrow in the arm even as he blared out a call. The music drowned in a horrible false note. Then the man lowered the horn and let out an honest shriek.

  No sooner had Hirundo swung men to cover the perceived threat than he discovered that these Menteshe generals, whoever they were, had more imagination than the leaders he’d faced the year before. The perceived threat turned o
ut not to be the real one. After luring Avornan reinforcements to the right, the nomads struck hard at the left, about halfway between the Avornan force on the hillock and the center.

  For a moment, Hirundo and Grus seemed to be struggling to find out who could curse more foully. Grus had hoped his royal guardsman would hurtle forward and smash the nomads, as they’d done before. Now, with Hirundo sending the heavily armed and armored riders back and to the left, the king hoped the guardsmen could keep the Menteshe from smashing his army.

  “Grus!” the guardsmen shouted as they spurred their horses forward. “Hurrah for King Grus!” That was flattering. The king would have liked it better had they not used his name for a war cry in such desperate straits.

  The Menteshe poured a fierce volley of arrows into the guardsmen. Some of the Avornans fell from their horses with a clatter. Some of the horses went down, too. But armor for men and mounts proved its worth. The Menteshe didn’t break the guardsmen’s charge, as they’d plainly thought they would.

  Because they didn’t break it, they had to try to withstand it. Their ponies and the wax-boiled leather they used in place of chainmail were not up to opposing lancers on big, heavy horses. They fought bravely. Grus didn’t think he’d ever seen the nomads fail to fight bravely; they would have been much less dangerous if they hadn’t been brave. Brave or not, though, they couldn’t keep the guardsmen from breaking the momentum of their advance.

  When Grus saw that the Menteshe had stalled, he dared breathe again. With the nomads in his own army’s rear, he’d feared his force would come unraveled like a poorly woven cloak. He began to think past mere survival. Pointing toward the hillock on the left, he said, “I wish we could get a messenger over there. If they hit the nomads from behind now …”

  “I know,” the general answered. “I’ll try if you like, but I don’t think anybody can get through the Menteshe.”