“Hirundo?” Grus said. He had his own ideas, but the general knew—or was supposed to know—more about such things than he did.
Hirundo stroked his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. “Well, I can’t say for certain, mind,” he warned, and Grus and Pterocles both nodded. Hirundo pointed east. “If I were in charge of the Menteshe, that’s where I’d put them. They can strike at our flank from a position like that, do us a lot of harm.”
“Why not the other flank?” Pterocles pointed west.
“Well, they could,” Hirundo said, “but that’s not how I’d do it. The ground is better the other way. They’d be coming downhill at us—do you see?—not trying to climb. It makes a difference.”
“I suppose it would.” Pterocles plainly didn’t see how.
Patient as a father teaching his son to swim, Hirundo said, “You want to have the ground with you if you can. Either mounted or on foot, a charge uphill is harder than the other kind. Arrows don’t go as far when you’re shooting them up a slope, either.”
“Oh.” Pterocles nodded, perhaps in wisdom. “All right.”
Grus, who agreed with his general, set a hand on the wizard’s shoulder. “Every trade has its tricks and its secrets. Hirundo and I wouldn’t have any idea what to do if we needed to cast a spell, but we’ve tried to learn a thing or two about soldiering.”
“All right,” Pterocles said again. “I’ll take your word for it, then, and I’ll stick to things I know a little something about myself.” He took from his belt pouch an amulet made from a brown, shiny stone pierced and penetrated by a duller, darker one. “Chalcedony and emery,” the wizard explained. “Together, they are proof against all manner of fantastical illusions.”
“Good,” Grus said. “But don’t use them yet.” Pterocles, who had clutched the amulet and was about to start a spell, stopped in surprise. The king went on, “If you find there are trees there and the Menteshe are lurking in among them, or something like that, you ought to be able to make them sorry they ever decided to try to attack us.”
“I can try,” Pterocles said doubtfully.
Hirundo snapped his fingers. “What about that spell you used against the Chernagor ships that were trying to bring grain into Nishevatz? You know—the one where you set them on fire when they were still out on the ocean. If they’re hiding in a forest or an olive grove, say, you could roast ’em easy as you please.”
“If roasting them were as easy as you make it sound, I wouldn’t have any trouble—that’s true enough.” Now Pterocles’ voice was tart. He rummaged some more in his belt pouch, and finally pulled out a clear disk of rock crystal thicker at the center than the edges. “I can try that spell, anyhow,” he said. “One thing’s sure—the sun is stronger here than it was up in the Chernagor country. I’ll need some greenery—with luck, some twigs torn from trees—to work the spell if I turn out to need it.”
Grus sent some of his guardsmen off. They came back with olive branches, twigs from almond trees, and fragrant orange and lemon boughs. No doubt the thralls who watched them would be puzzled—if puzzlement could soak into the sorry wits of thralls. When Pterocles had the greenery piled in front of his feet, Grus said, “Now, if you please.”
“Certainly, Your Majesty.” The wizard had a knack for being most exasperating when he was most polite. He gave a bow that struck Grus as more sardonic than sincere, then clutched the amulet in his left hand and looked east and south. He pointed in that direction with his right forefinger. Grus wished he hadn’t; any watching Menteshe would get a good idea of what he was doing. But maybe there was no help for it. The king kept quiet.
Pterocles began a chant that started softly but grew louder and more insistent as it went on. Grus peered in the direction of the wizard’s outthrust forefinger. He waited to see if the landscape would change. If it did, he would deal with whatever the nomads were hiding. If it didn’t … well, better safe than sorry.
He and Hirundo and Pterocles all exclaimed at the same time. The sere, dun, dry landscape on the far side of the river wavered and rippled, as though it were being seen through running water. And then, quite suddenly, an almond grove that hadn’t been there—or hadn’t seemed to be there—appeared out of nowhere. Menteshe horsemen—Grus couldn’t see how many—waited in the shade of the trees. There were plenty to cause his army trouble; he was sure of that.
He got only a brief glimpse of the grove before it vanished again. A woman whose skirt was flipped up by the wind might have yanked it down again that fast, leaving him with only a memory of her legs. Sometimes a memory would do, though. “Use your spell now,” the king told Pterocles. “They know you’ve gotten through theirs.”
“I’m already doing it,” the wizard said. And, sure enough, he was separating almond twigs out of the greenery the guardsmen had set at his feet. “I hope the Menteshe don’t have a counterspell handy. The Chernagors never did figure out what to do about this one, but the nomads have more worry about fire than the northerners did, because they live in a hot, dry country. Well, we’ll see before long.”
He held the crystal disk perhaps a palm’s breadth above the bits from the almond branches. A bright spot of sunlight—it almost seemed a miniature sun—sprang into being on a twig. Grus wondered what magic lay in the crystal to make it do such a thing. Whatever the cause, that bright spot of sunlight seemed hot as a miniature sun, too. Smoke rose from the twig. A moment later, it burst into flame.
Pterocles chanted and pointed, sending his fire where he wanted it to go. For some little while, nothing—or nothing visible—happened. Then the illusion on the far side of the river wavered again, wavered and winked out. Pterocles wasn’t attacking it now, not directly. But the Menteshe sorcerers abandoned it because they had other things that needed their power more.
Smoke streamed up into the sky. The leafy tops of the almond trees were on fire. Even from that distance, Grus could hear the nomads’ horses screaming in terror and panic. The Menteshe had no chance to keep their mounts under control, not with flames above their heads and burning leaves and branches falling down on them. The horses galloped off in all directions, carrying their riders with them.
Grus nudged Hirundo. “Get our men across the river now, before the nomads can pull themselves together.”
“Right.” The general started shouting orders.
Pterocles looked as happy as a six-year-old with a brand-new wooden sword. “They haven’t got a counterspell for that one, either,” he said, grinning widely. “I always did think it was a pretty piece of magic, and it’s done some good things for us.”
“I should say so.” Grus remembered tall-masted Chernagor ships catching fire out in the Northern Sea, where he could have reached them in no other way than through magic. He looked at the burning trees. Now he had another memory to go with that one. He slapped Pterocles on the back. “Nicely done.”
“I’ll have to thank Hirundo when he’s done yelling his head off,” Pterocles said. “That might not have occurred to me if he hadn’t suggested it.”
“It seems to be working pretty well,” Grus said. “Hard on the almonds, but nothing we can do about that.”
Avornan soldiers formed a perimeter on the far bank of the river. A few Menteshe rode toward them, but only a few—not nearly enough to keep them from making the crossing. And, at Hirundo’s orders, the Avornans had brought some stone- and dart-throwers over the river with them. The missiles they flung discouraged the nomads from getting too close. Before long, even the handful of Menteshe who’d tried to oppose Grus’ army wheeled their horses and trotted away.
“We took care of that,” Pterocles said.
“They aren’t gone for good,” Grus said. “They’ll try to give us trouble somewhere else. But they won’t give us trouble here, and that’s what I was worried about.” He grinned at the wizard. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure, Your Majesty, and I mean every word of that,” Pterocles answered. “Every time we set another thrall village f
ree, I’m getting some of my own back against …” He did not say the name, but looked south. Grus nodded, understanding whom he meant. Pterocles went on, “Every time I do something like this, I’m getting some back, too.”
“All of Avornis owes … him a lot,” Grus said. “If this campaign goes the way we hope, we’ll get to pay a lot of it back. We’ll have … something he’s kept for a long time.”
If they got to Yozgat, if they got the Scepter of Mercy—what then? Grus didn’t know, but oh, how he wanted to find out!
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Yes, I’m going out to the country again,” Lanius said. Sosia’s expression was dubious, to say the least. “You can’t tell me you enjoy it there,” she said. “You can’t, I mean, unless you’ve got someone there waiting for you.”
“I do,” he said, and her eyes flashed furiously. He held up a hand to hold back the lightning. “It’s not a woman. You saw that the last time you were there. You can come again, whenever you please. Don’t tell me ahead of time. I’m not worried about that. But I’ve got Collurio and Crinitus out there, and Pouncer, too.”
“That miserable moncat,” his wife said. “The way you talk about it, it might as well be a person.”
“One of these days, maybe, all Avornis will be talking about it,” Lanius said.
“What makes you think all Avornis isn’t talking about it already?” Sosia paused to spoon up some breakfast porridge and sip from her cup of wine. “I know what Avornis is saying, too. ‘Why is the king spending so much money and wasting so much time on a dumb beast?’ People can understand mistresses. But the moncat?” She shook her head.
“Pouncer is a beast, but he’s a long way from dumb. People will see that, too,” Lanius said. He started to say even more, but held his tongue at the last moment. The Banished One had never stalked Sosia’s dreams. He wouldn’t have talked about Pouncer with Anser or Hirundo, either. Grus and Pterocles … understood.
Sosia didn’t. “Well, go on, then. I can’t stop you, but I don’t like it, either.”
“It has nothing to do with you,” Lanius said, and he wasn’t lying. “It’s business of state, that’s what it is.”
His wife sniffed. “Tell me another one. I wonder what a bricklayer or a candlemaker says when he wants to get away from his wife for a while.”
Lanius exhaled in exasperation. “Do you want to come with me? You can, if you care to.”
“No.” Sosia made a face. “I don’t care for the country at all. I like it right where I am. You always liked it here, too. Is it any surprise I wonder what you’re up to when you start doing things you don’t usually do?”
She might have been a constable keeping track of a sneak thief’s habits. Lanius thought that was unfair. He never took anything that wasn’t freely given. Whether he took something Sosia didn’t want him to have was a different question, one he didn’t care to examine so closely.
He did ride out to the country a few days later. While he was interested in what Pouncer had learned, riding out to see the moncat was not his idea of fun. Some people enjoyed horseback riding for its own sake. Lanius found that almost as strange—and almost as perverse—as Limosa’s taste for the lash. He’d become a good enough rider to stay in the saddle if his horse didn’t get too frisky, and he rode placid geldings to try to make sure that didn’t happen. He could do it, but he did it without enjoyment.
There was something he had in common with Grus. The other king wasn’t a natural equestrian, either; Hirundo, who was, never tired of teasing him. But Grus did well enough not merely to ride but to fight on horseback. Grus might not—did not, in fact—have a lot of education, but he’d proved competent in any number of ways.
A hawk wheeled overhead in the blue. Somewhere in the fields of ripening grain scurried the rabbits and mice on which it lived. Lanius couldn’t see them or smell them, but the hawk could. As often as not, peasants shot at hawks or netted them because they sometimes stole chickens and ducks. Lanius thought they did more good than harm, and by a wide margin, too.
He wondered if a royal edict would keep peasants from killing them. As far as he knew, no king had ever issued a decree like that. In the back of his mind, he heard Grus saying, Don’t make a law if you can’t enforce it. People won’t obey it, and they won’t respect the other laws so much, either.
That was probably true, however little he cared for it. And he knew he could not force people to obey a law protecting hawks. He sighed. Good ideas often broke to pieces when they ran up against brute fact.
The road was dusty. The only time roads weren’t dusty was when they were muddy, which made them worse. How much would cobblestoning all the kingdom’s main roads cost, how long would it take, and how many men would it need? Too much, too long, and too many—the answer formed almost as fast as the question.
Collurio and his son didn’t know the king was coming. The animal trainer greeted him with a bow and the words, “By the gods, Your Majesty, you were right.”
“Was I?” Lanius always liked hearing that. “Uh, about what?”
“About hawks, Your Majesty,” Collurio replied. “The soldiers have shot three of them that tried to swoop down on the moncat.”
“Have they?” Lanius said, surprised in spite of his precautions.
Collurio nodded. “They sure have. One eagle—biggest bird I’ve ever seen, I think—one fish-hawk, and one ordinary hawk. Others were circling around, too, but they didn’t do anything more than circle. It was almost like they knew to stay away from the archers’ bows.”
“Was it?” Lanius said, and Collurio nodded again. The king plucked at his rather unkempt beard. “Isn’t that interesting?” He remembered the hawk he’d seen floating in the air earlier in the day. Maybe it hadn’t been thinking about mice and rabbits. Maybe it had been thinking of moncats instead. And maybe the Banished One had been doing its thinking for it.
Grus looked down into the well. The stench wafting up from the shaft told him what the Menteshe had done, but he wanted to see for himself. Sure enough, the cut-up carcasses of a couple of sheep, or possibly goats, bobbed in the water.
Hirundo looked down the shaft, too. “Well, we won’t get any use out of that one,” he said matter-of-factly.
“They’ve poisoned quite a few of them,” Grus said. “It’s getting to be a nuisance.” It was getting to be more than a nuisance, but he tried to admit as little as he could, even to himself.
“Where there’s one well, odds are we can dig another one close by,” Hirundo said.
“Yes, that’s true, but whenever we have to stop and dig, it takes time,” the king answered. “I worry about every day we don’t spend pushing on toward Yozgat. You can only stretch a campaigning season so far.”
“If we can get supplies down from the north, we’ll do all right,” Hirundo said. “We could stay through the winter if we had to. No blizzards to worry about here, not like in the Chernagor country or even in Avornis.”
“No, I suppose not.” Grus looked south just the same. If the Banished One wanted to badly enough, could he bring a snowstorm screaming down on an army besieging Yozgat? Grus didn’t know, and hoped he wouldn’t have to find out the hard way. He brought his thoughts back to more immediate worries. “Do we have enough water to keep moving?”
“For now, yes,” Hirundo answered. “If we don’t come across any in the next couple of days, then we have a problem. But I’m not going to fret about that. Something will turn up. It usually does.”
“I hope so.” Grus envied the general’s easy optimism. Hirundo had been saying things like that his whole life long, and he’d been right most of the time. If he happened to be wrong here, that would be more than a problem. It would be a disaster. The king pounded a fist against his thigh. “This country is a lot drier than Avornis.”
“We’ve managed to get this far.” Yes, Hirundo had no trouble staying cheerful. “Yozgat’s just over the next rise—oh, not really, but close enough. Don’t worry, Your Majesty. W
e’ll do all right.”
“Maybe we will,” said Grus, who certainly wanted to believe it. “This is liable to be hard on the thralls, though. Everything lately has been hard on those poor people—war across their fields, the plague during the winter, and now this.”
“Not everything,” Hirundo said. “They’re free—the ones who are left are free, anyhow. And I’ll tell you something else, Your Majesty. I’ll bet the freed ones will know of more wells and such than the Menteshe do. If we run into what looks like trouble, asking them is likely to do us more good than anything else.”
“Mm, I’d say that’s a pretty good bet,” Grus agreed after a little thought. “And it’s something the Banished One and the Menteshe are liable to miss. Who pays attention to thralls unless he has to?”
“We do,” Hirundo answered.
Grus nodded, wondering whether that was a weakness the enemy could exploit or a strength that might help Avornis win this struggle. He had no idea—it would all depend on how things played out. And caring about the thralls also might turn out not to matter one way or the other.
The army did move forward, and found more poisoned wells in its path. Men and animals started getting thirsty. Most streams were either dry or tiny trickles in the summer heat. Grus sent wizards ahead with the scouts, to bring freedom to some thralls and try out Hirundo’s notion.
It worked even better than the general might have guessed. The thralls found wells and streams and even a pond the Menteshe had missed. The army got enough water to keep going—not a lot of water, but enough. And the thralls, even with the darkness freshly lifted from their spirits, were not just willing but eager to do all they could for the Avornans. The Menteshe had been hard on them and hard on their ancestors for hundreds of years. How much of that oppression did they really understand? Enough to know which side they were on; that was clear.
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