The Scepter's Return

by Harry Turtledove

  “Why, to the Maze, of course.” Serinus certainly had the answer to that question. “You’ve sent enough people there yourself. High time you find out what it’s like, don’t you think?”

  Grus thought nothing of the sort. Still more outraged than afraid, he filled his lungs to shout for help. Some of the soldiers saw him doing it. They shook their heads. A couple of them brandished their weapons. He didn’t shout.

  “Smart fellow.” Serinus nodded approval. “They say blood is so hard to get out from between these little mosaic tiles.” His voice lost its good humor and assumed the snap of command. “Now get moving. If anybody sees us and tries to stop us, you’ll be the one who’s sorriest. I promise you that.”

  Believing him, Grus did get moving. He couldn’t help asking, “Who put you up to this? King Lanius?”

  Serinus laughed uproariously. So did his henchmen. “By the gods in the heavens, no,” the officer answered, laughing still. “We serve King Ortalis.”

  “King—?” Associating his son with sovereignty was so ridiculous, Grus couldn’t do it even now. He wanted to laugh himself, at the absurdity of the idea. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Ortalis and these men evidently didn’t think it was absurd. I should have paid more attention to Hirundo, Grus thought, much too late for it to do him any good.

  Serinus and the soldiers hustled him out of the palace. They bundled him onto a horse and tied his legs beneath him. They had horses, too. Out of the city they rode, as slick as boiled asparagus.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Your Majesty, the other king wants to see you in the small dining room as soon as you can get there,” a guard outside Lanius’ chamber told him as soon as he opened the door.

  “Does he?” Lanius said around a yawn. The soldier nodded. Lanius yawned again, then asked, “Did he tell you what it was about?”

  “No, Your Majesty, but I think you’d better hurry. I’ve got the feeling it’s important,” the guard answered.

  He knew more than he was letting on. Lanius didn’t have to be a genius to figure that out. The king wondered if he ought to press the soldier. In the end, he decided not to. He would find out soon enough from Grus. He wondered what had happened. The other king hadn’t summoned him like this in quite a while.

  Scratching his head, Lanius went to the room where he usually ate breakfast. Ortalis sat there, sipping on a cup of wine and fidgeting a little. “Oh, hello,” Lanius said. “The guard must have gotten his signals crossed. I thought your father would be here.”

  “What did he say?” Ortalis asked. The silver goblet shook in his hand—not very much, but enough for Lanius to notice. “What exactly did he say?”

  Lanius thought back. He prided himself on being able to get things like that straight. “He said the other king wanted to see me in here as soon as possible.” That wasn’t word for word, but it caught the meaning well enough.

  Ortalis nodded and smiled—a surprisingly nervous smile for so early in the day. “Good. He did get it right then,” he said. “That’s what I told him to tell you, all right.”

  “What you told him to tell me?” Lanius’ wits weren’t working as well as he wished they were.

  “What I told him to tell you, yes.” Ortalis sounded a little more confident this time. Without rising from his stool, he struck a pose. “I’m the new King of Avornis.”

  “You’re what?” No, Lanius wasn’t at his best. He didn’t laugh in Ortalis’ face, but held back only by the tiniest of margins. “What’s happened to your father?” That worry was the main thing that made him not show everything he was thinking.

  He waited for Ortalis to tell him Grus was desperately ill, or even that he’d died in the night. Grus had seemed in good health the last time Lanius saw him, but the other king wasn’t a young man. Such things could happen, and happen all too easily.

  But, a certain ferocious glee in his voice, Ortalis answered, “I packed him off to the Maze, that’s what.”

  Now Lanius frankly stared. “You … sent your father to the Maze?” He couldn’t believe it. Grus had overcome every foe in sight, from rebellious Avornan nobles to King Dagipert of Thervingia to the Banished One himself. How could he possibly have fallen to his own son, a far less dangerous opponent?

  As soon as Lanius asked himself the question that way, the likely answer became clear. As far as Grus was concerned, would Ortalis have been a visible opponent at all? Grus had always made allowances for his legitimate son, and never taken him very seriously. He had to be regretting that now.

  “You’d best believe I did,” Ortalis growled. “He had it coming, too. This is my kingdom now, by Olor’s beard.”

  “Yours?” Lanius said. “What about me?”

  “What about you? I’ll tell you what about you,” his brother-in-law answered. “You can be king, too, if you want. You can go on wearing the crown, if you want. Whenever my old man said, ‘Frog,’ you’d hop. As long as you keep on hopping for me, everything will be fine.” He smiled, as though to say he was sure Lanius wouldn’t mind an arrangement like that.

  Back when Grus first put the crown on his own head, all the power had been in his hands. Lanius had been a figurehead, nothing more. Grus would have gotten rid of him if he could have done it without inflaming people by ending Avornis’ ancient dynasty. He hadn’t even bothered pretending anything different.

  Little by little, though, Lanius had gathered bits and pieces of power into his own hands. Grus’ going out on campaign so often hadn’t hurt things, not one bit. Grus had needed someone who could run things here in the capital while he was away. To whom else would he have given the job? Ortalis? Ortalis hadn’t wanted it. And so it came to Lanius, and more and more came with it.

  Had Ortalis ever bothered to notice Lanius really was a king in his own right? It seemed unlikely.

  Lanius almost asked him, And what happens if I don’t feel like hopping? He almost did, but he didn’t. The look on Ortalis’ face gave him all the answer he needed. If you don’t, I’ll hurt you. I’ll enjoy hurting you, too. Have you got any idea how much I’ll enjoy it?

  What Lanius did say was, “I’ll work with you the way I worked with your father on one condition.”

  “Condition?” Ortalis’ face had been ugly before. It got uglier now. “What kind of condition? You don’t tell me what to do, Lanius. No one tells me what to do now. I’ve had a bellyful of that from everybody.”

  “This isn’t much,” Lanius said, which might have been true and might not have.

  “What is it, then?” Suspicion still clotted Ortalis’ voice.

  “If the Scepter of Mercy accepts you, I will, too,” Lanius said. “Your father could use it. So can I. If you can, too, then I know you’ll be good for Avornis, and I won’t say a word about anything at all.” After a moment, inspired, he added, “And the soldiers will want to see that you can wield it, too. They spent a lot of time and a lot of work and a lot of blood bringing it back from the Menteshe country, you know.”

  Odds were Ortalis knew nothing of the sort. He hadn’t wanted to know anything about the Scepter. But he just laughed now. “Is that all you want?” he said. “Sure, I’ll do that. Like the Scepter cares who’s holding it! Whenever you want, I’ll do it, and the soldiers can stare as much as they please. Does that suit you, Your Majesty?” He made a mockery of Lanius’ title.

  “That suits me fine, Your Majesty.” Lanius also mocked his title, but Ortalis never realized it.

  Lanius wondered whether he really would, whether he really could, accept Ortalis as King of Avornis if the Scepter of Mercy did. If the Scepter does, what choice have I got? he asked himself. However little he liked it, he didn’t see that he had any.

  Grus had been through the Maze many times—always on the way to somewhere else. He’d sent people here for good, but he’d never imagined he would come here for good one of these days himself.

  The Maze was, when you got right down to it, a dreary place. River turned to swamp turned to mudflat
. It was heaven on earth for mosquitoes and gnats and midges. Grus supposed it was also pretty good if you happened to be something like a heron or a turtle or a frog. If you were a man … The Maze was green enough, but most of it was a sickly green, not a vibrant one. Besides being full of biting bugs, the air smelled stagnant.

  “You won’t get away with this,” Grus told his captors as they rowed him along in a small boat.

  “Seems to me we already have,” the officer in charge of them answered calmly. “As soon as we got you out of the city of Avornis without running into trouble, the game was ours. We’ll pack you away in a nice, quiet monastery, and the outside world can start forgetting about you. People get forgotten all the time.”

  “And suppose I don’t feel like becoming a monk?” Grus asked.

  The officer—his name was Gygis—only shrugged. “Then we tie something heavy to your hands and feet, we find a place where the water’s a little deeper than usual, and we dump you over the side. Our worries are over either way. You figure out what you want.”

  “Ortalis gave the orders for this?” Grus couldn’t believe his son had brought off such a smoothly efficient coup.

  “Of course. Who else?” Gygis seemed innocence personified. That made Grus wonder whether he and his fellow officers were the tail or the dog in this plot. Could they use Ortalis for a figurehead? Why not? Grus had used Lanius as one for years. Gygis went on, “So what’ll it be? The monastic life or a short one? You’d better make up your mind in a hurry.”

  No one had told Grus what to do like that since his father died. He noticed Gygis wasn’t calling him Your Majesty. In spite of himself, Grus laughed. He’d wondered what he had left to do as king after recovering the Scepter of Mercy. Maybe the answer was nothing all along.

  “Well?” Gygis demanded, obviously suspicious of that laugh. “Which way do we do it?”

  “With the choice you gave me, being a monk looks better and better all of a sudden,” Grus answered. And that was, perhaps, truer than either he or Gygis fully realized.

  Ortalis’ henchman grinned a crooked grin. “You see? You’re not a fool after all.”

  Oh, yes, I am, Grus thought. Lanius wrote Ortalis was keeping dangerous company. Hirundo came and warned him about his son. Everyone saw trouble coming except him. And everyone was right, too. I always was too soft on Ortalis.

  “Plenty of people before you have made the same choice. Nothing to be ashamed about,” Gygis said, trying to be soothing. “Why, when you get to the monastery, you’ll probably run into people you know.”

  People you sent away, he meant. “Oh, joy,” Grus said in distinctly hollow tones.

  Not many people lived in the Maze of their own accord. There were some fishermen, some trappers, a few men who gathered herbs and sold them to healers and wizards, and a few more who did a variety of things they tried to keep dark from Avornis’ tax collectors. Every so often, as Grus’ boat made its way through those tricky channels, someone would watch for a while from a boat of his own or from a hummock of ground slightly higher and drier than most.

  A couple of the larger hummocks boasted real villages. Grus’ boat gave those a wide berth. Monasteries sprouted like toadstools on smaller patches of more or less dry ground. Some of them were for people who wanted to get away from the world and contemplate the gods at their leisure. Others—more—were for people put away from the world and invited to contemplate the gods instead of being executed and finding out about them with no need for contemplation.

  Grus’ captors took him toward a monastery of the latter sort. The structure seemed more like a fortress than anything else. Its outer walls looked at least as formidable as the ones Grus had faced at Yozgat. But these works were designed to hold people in, not out.

  Gygis cupped his hands in front of his mouth and hallooed when the boat approached those frowning walls. One of the men atop them shouted back. “We’ve got a new friend for you!” Gygis yelled.

  “Who’s Grus angry at now?” came the reply.

  Gygis laughed. Sitting there beside him, Grus didn’t think it was so funny. “You’ll see when we bring him in,” Gygis said.

  A rickety little jetty stuck out into the stream. One of Gygis’ men tied up the boat. He looked at Grus and jerked a thumb toward the monastery. “Out you go.”

  Out Grus went. After sitting in the cramped boat for a couple of days, his legs had a low opinion of walking, but he managed. Gygis and his men made sure Grus went nowhere but toward the monastery.

  He and they had to wait outside while a stout portcullis groaned up. Were those monks turning the windlass that raised the chains attached to the portcullis? Who else would they be?

  A plump man in a shapeless brown wool robe met the newcomers just inside the portcullis. “Well, well,” he said. “Who have we here?”

  “Abbot Pipilo, let me present your newest holy man,” Gygis said with a broad, insincere smile. “His name is Grus.”

  “Grus?” Pipilo stared first at Gygis, then at the suddenly overthrown king. “Olor’s beard, it is Grus! How did Lanius manage that?”

  In spite of himself, Grus started to laugh. Even in the gloom of the fortified gateway, he could see Gygis turn red. The officer said, “King Ortalis now holds the throne with King Lanius. You would be well advised to remember it. He is my master, and I serve him gladly.”

  “Until something happens to him, or until you see a better deal for yourself,” Grus said. “That’s how you served me.”

  “King … Ortalis?” Pipilo said. “Well, well! Isn’t that interesting?” He gathered himself, then nodded to Grus. “Come in, come in. You’re safe here, anyhow.”

  “Huzzah,” Grus said.

  Pipilo laughed. “It may not be everything you hoped for, but you’ll agree, I think, it’s better than a lot of the things that could have happened to you with your son taking the throne.” Since Grus couldn’t argue with that, he kept quiet. Pipilo went on, “Forgive me for saying this, but I think I ought to remind you that here you’ll just be another monk. If this little domain has a sovereign, I am he.”

  He didn’t sound as though he was rubbing Grus’ nose in that—only reminding him, as he’d said. And Grus did need reminding. His word had literally been law for years. Having someone else tell him what to do would be … different.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” he answered carefully.

  That made the abbot laugh again. “By which you mean you don’t want to believe it. Well, nobody can blame you for that. You just got here, and you didn’t want to come. But you are here, and I have to tell you you’re unlikely to leave, and so you should try to make the best of it.”

  How could anyone make the best of this? Grus wondered. He kept that to himself for fear of insulting Pipilo. The abbot beckoned him forward. Grus followed Pipilo into the monastery. Gygis and his henchmen must have gone back to their boat, for the portcullis creaked down again. With it in place, Grus was trapped here, but he felt no more imprisoned than he had with the iron gate still up.

  “First thing we’ll do is get you a robe, Brother Grus,” Pipilo said. “You’ll feel more at ease when you look like everybody else. It will be warmer than that nightshirt, too. You were taken by surprise, I gather?”

  “Oh, you might say so.” Grus’ voice was as dry as he could make it. Pipilo chuckled appreciatively. “How did you become a monk?” Grus asked him, meaning, I don’t remember sending you here.

  “As a matter of fact, I’ve been here since the very end of King Mergus’ days,” Pipilo replied, understanding what he hadn’t said as well as what he had. “I was a young man then, but he thought I had too much ambition. I dare say he was right, or I wouldn’t have risen to become abbot, would I?”

  One ambition he evidently didn’t have was escape. Even if he had had it, it wouldn’t have done him much good, so he was just as well off without it. A vegetable garden filled much of the monastery’s large courtyard. Some of the monks weeding and pruning there looked up from
their labors to stare at Grus. They wore brown robes with hoods like Pipilo’s. Grus would have felt as out of place here in his royal regalia as he did in his nightshirt.

  Wearing that nightshirt didn’t keep him from being recognized. A man of about his own age with a wild gray beard came up to him and wagged a finger in his face. “See how it feels, Your Majesty? Do you see?”

  “That will be enough of that, Brother Petrosus,” Pipilo said. “You did not care to have people revile you when you first joined us here. Kindly extend Brother Grus the same courtesy you wanted for yourself.”

  Grus’ former treasury minister didn’t care to listen. “Is Ortalis king now?” he demanded of Grus, who couldn’t help nodding. Petrosus chortled. “Then I’ll get out! I know I will! Limosa will see to it.”

  Would Ortalis listen to Petrosus’ daughter about this? He might, certainly, but Grus had his doubts. And he didn’t want Petrosus to think he could get away with anything. He said, “Listen, my former friend, if Ortalis will send his own father into exile, why would he care even a copper’s worth about his father-in-law?”

  Petrosus scowled at him. “Because I wouldn’t tell him what to do every minute of the day and night.”

  “No?” Grus laughed, not pleasantly. “Do you know how many scars he’s put on your daughter’s back?” He didn’t tell Petrosus that Limosa had enjoyed getting her welts. Maybe Petrosus already knew about his daughter’s tastes. If he didn’t … Grus was aiming to hurt him, but that went too far.

  “And that will be enough of that from you also, Brother Grus,” Pipilo said with the air of a man who had the authority to give such orders. “Brother Petrosus, kindly return to your gardening.” Petrosus went, though his face was crimson and he ground his teeth in fury. That he went proved to Grus what a power Pipilo was here.

  The abbot led the king to a storeroom where, as promised, a monk issued him a brown robe and a pair of stout sandals. The robe was as comfortable as anything he’d worn. The sandals would need breaking in.

  A bell rang. “That is the call to midmorning prayer,” Pipilo said. “We gather together at daybreak, midmorning, noon, midafternoon, and sunset. Come along, Brother. You are one of us now, and this is required of you.”