The Chernagor Pirates (15 page)

“What's that?” Ortalis was still sneering. He might as well have said,
You can't make me do anything.

He looked almost comically surprised when his father slapped him in the face. “This—and I should have done it a long time ago,” Grus said, breathing hard.

“You can't do that,” Ortalis blurted in disbelief.

“Oh, yes, I can.” Grus slapped him again. “It's not a hundredth part of what you did to those girls. How do you like getting it instead of giving it?”

Ortalis' eyes went so wide, Grus could see white all around his irises. Then, cursing as foully as any river-galley sailor, Ortalis hurled himself at Grus. His churning fists thudded against his father's ribs. “I'll murder you, you stinking son of a whore!” he screamed.

“Go ahead and try.” Grus ducked a punch that would have flattened his nose. Ortalis' fist connected with the top of his head. That hurt his son more than it did him. Ortalis howled. Grus hit him in the pit of the stomach. The howl cut off as Ortalis battled to breathe.

He kept fighting even after that. He had courage, of a sort. What he lacked was skill. Grus had learned to fight in a hard school. Ortalis, who'd had things much easier in his life, had never really learned at all. His father gave him a thorough, professional beating.

At last, Ortalis threw up his hands and wailed. “Enough, Father! In the names of the gods, enough! Please!”

Grus stood over him, breathing hard. The king's fists stayed clenched. He willed them open.
If you don't stop now, you'll beat him to death,
he told himself. Part of him wanted to. Realizing that was what made him back away from his son.

“All right,” he said, his voice boulders in his throat. “All right. Get up.”

“I—I don't think I can.”

“You can,” Grus ground out. “I know what I did to you. I know what I should have done to you, too—what you really deserved. And so do you.”

Ortalis didn't try to argue with him. Keeping quiet was one of the smarter things his son had ever done. Had he denied what Grus said, Grus might have started hitting him again, and might not have been able to stop. Tears and blood and snot smeared across his face, Ortalis struggled upright.

“They—” The prince stopped. He might have started to say something like,
They were just serving girls.
Again, he was smart to keep quiet. That might have fired Grus' fury, too. After a moment, Ortalis said, “I'm sorry.”

That was better. It wasn't enough, not even the bare beginnings of enough, but it was better. Grus said, “If you ever do anything like that again, you'll get twice what I just gave you. Do you understand me, Ortalis? I'm not joking. You'd better not think I am.”

“I understand you.” Ortalis' voice was mushy. His lip was swollen and cut and bleeding. He glared at Grus as well as he could; one eye was swollen shut, the other merely blacked. Grus stared stonily back. His hands ached. So did his ribs, on which Ortalis had connected several times. And so did the heart thudding under those ribs. His heart ached worst of all.

If he'd shown that, everything he'd done to Ortalis would have been wasted. Making his voice stay hard, he said, “Get out of my sight. And go wash yourself. You'll want to stay out of everyone's sight for a few days, believe me.”

Ortalis inhaled and opened his mouth. Once more, though, nothing came out. He might have started to say,
I'll tell people my father beats me.
Again, that would have been the wrong thing to throw at the king. Again, he realized it and kept quiet. Left hand clutched to
his
sore ribs, Grus' son and heir turned away from him and made his slow, painful way out the door.

Servants chattered among themselves. Their gossip, though, took a while to drift up through clerks and scribes and noblemen and finally to King Lanius' ears. By the time Lanius heard Grus and Ortalis had had a falling-out, most of the evidence was gone from Ortalis' person. A black eye fades slowly, but a black eye could also have happened in any number of ways. Lanius asked no questions. Ortalis volunteered nothing.

Lanius thought about asking Grus what had happened. His father-in-law, though, did not seem approachable—which was, if anything, an understatement. Lanius resigned himself to never knowing what had gone on.

Then one day he got word that Cristata wanted to see him. He didn't mind seeing her at all, though he carefully didn't wonder about what Sosia would have thought of that sentiment. After curtsying before him, Cristata said, “The gods have blessed Avornis with two fine kings.”

“I'm glad you think so,” Lanius answered.
Would I be happier if the gods had blessed Avornis with only
one
fine king? For the life of me, I don't know.
He made himself stop woolgathering. “Do you care to tell me why?”

“Because you told King Grus about what happened to me, and he went and made his own son sorry he did what he did—and then he gave me gold, too,” the maidservant answered.

“Did he?” Lanius said. Grus hadn't said a word about doing any such thing.

But Cristata nodded. “He sure did. It's more money than I ever had before. It's almost enough to make me a taxp—” She broke off.

Almost enough to make me a taxpayer.
She hadn't wanted to say anything like that to someone who was interested in collecting taxes and making sure other people paid them. Most of the time, she would have been smart not to say anything like that. Today, though, Lanius smiled and answered, “I'll never tell.”

Did he feel so friendly to her just because she was a pretty girl? Or was he also trying to show her not everyone in the royal family would behave the way Ortalis had, even if he chanced to get her alone?
What I'd like to do if I chanced to get her alone
… He shook his head.
Stop that.

“King Grus even said he was sorry.” Cristata's eyes got big and round. “Can you imagine? A king saying he was sorry? To
me?
And he was so friendly all the time we were talking.”

What would Queen Estrilda say if she heard that? Would she wonder whether Grus had shown his … friendliness in ways that had nothing to do with talking? Lanius knew he did.

Oblivious to the questions she'd spawned, Cristata went on, “He's going to see if he can send me to the kitchens. There's room to move up there; it's not like laundry or sweeping.”

“No, I don't suppose it would be.” Lanius' voice was vague. He couldn't have said which branches of palace service offered the chance to get ahead and which were dead ends. Grus knew. He knew—and he acted.

Why don't I know things like that?
Lanius wondered after Cristata curtsied again and left the little audience chamber where they'd been talking. Not even the sight of her pertly swinging backside as she left was enough to make him stop worrying at the question. Up until now, knowing things like that had never seemed important the way the reign of, say, King Alcedo—who'd sat on the throne when the Scepter of Mercy was lost—had.

Cristata knew the kitchens, and laundry and sweeping. Lanius would have fainted to learn she'd ever heard of King Alcedo. But Lanius was as ignorant of the world of service as Cristata was of history. Grus knew some of both—less history than Lanius, but also more of service. Lanius wished he had a manual to learn more of that other world.

There was no such manual. He knew that perfectly well. He knew of every book written in Avornis since long before Alcedo's day. He hadn't read them all, or even most of them, but he knew of them.

“I could write it myself,” he said thoughtfully. It wouldn't be useful just for him; Crex and all the Kings of Avornis who came after him might find it interesting. First, though, he'd have to learn quite a bit he didn't know yet. And if he needed to summon Cristata now and again to answer questions—well, it was all in the cause of advancing knowledge. Even Sosia would—might—have a hard time complaining.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Grus and Pterocles took turns looking through a peephole in the ceiling of the palace room where the remaining thralls the king had brought back from the south were confined. The winter before, two thralls had gotten out. One of them had almost killed Lanius. The other had almost killed Estrilda, though Grus had no doubt the thrall wanted him dead and not his queen.

The thralls paid no attention to the peephole. They might not have paid any attention even if he'd stood in the room with them. What made them thralls made them less than fully human. Their wits were dulled down to the point where they barely had the use of language. They were more than domestic animals that happened to walk on two legs and not four, but they weren't much more than animals.

They could, after a fashion, manage farms. Down south of the Stura River, in the lands the Menteshe ruled, they raised the crops that helped feed the nomads. The Menteshe didn't have to worry about uprisings from them, any more than they had to worry about uprisings from their cattle.

And yet, the thralls' ancestors had been Avornans who were unlucky enough to dwell in the south when the Menteshe conquered the land. The magic that made them thralls came from the Banished One. Human wizards had had little luck reversing it. Avornan armies had tried to reconquer the lost southern provinces a couple of times—tried and failed, with most of the defeated soldiers made into thralls. After the last such disaster, more than two hundred years before (Lanius knew the exact date), Avornis had given up trying.

Without some way to make thralls back into men and women of the ordinary sort, any reconquest was doomed to fail. Grus realized that, however much he wished he could have gotten around it. And so, leaning toward Pterocles, he asked, “What do you see down there?”

Even if the Chernagor wizard in Nishevatz—or was it the Banished One himself?—had not laid Pterocles low, Grus would have had no enormous confidence that he had the answer. Avornan wizards had wrestled with curing thralls for centuries—wrestled with it and gotten thrown, again and again and again. Alca seemed to have had the beginnings of some good new ideas … but Alca was gone, and she wouldn't be coming back. Pterocles was what the king had to work with.

“What do I see?” the wizard echoed. Grus hadn't bothered holding his voice down. Pterocles spoke in a hoarse, worried whisper. “I see emptiness. I see emptiness everywhere.”

That didn't surprise Grus. He asked, “How do we go about filling the emptiness with everything people have and thralls don't?”

“Fill the emptiness?” Pterocles laughed. That wasn't mirth coming out, or no sort of mirth with which Grus wanted to be acquainted. Pterocles went on, “If I knew how to fill emptiness, Your Majesty, don't you think I would fill my own? I wish I could. I wonder if I ever will.”

“Have you learned anything by watching the thralls?” Grus asked. “Would you like to go in among them and study them at close quarters?”

“Empty. So empty,” Pterocles said, and then, “If I went in, how would you tell me apart from them?”

“It wouldn't be hard,” Grus answered. “You would be the one acting like an idiot. They wouldn't be acting. They really are idiots.”

Again, the laugh that came from Pterocles only raised Grus' hackles. The wizard bent, backside in the air, and peered down at the thralls again. His face bore an expression of horrified fascination. He might have been asking himself whether he was or was not one with them.

After a little while, Grus elbowed him out of the way and looked down at the thralls again on his own behalf. He expected them to be doing what they usually did, which was not very much. Like cats, they spent a lot of time sleeping. Several of them stretched out on couches, snoring or simply lying motionless. One, though, stared up at the peephole with as much interest as Grus showed looking in the other direction.

Alarm ran through Grus. This wasn't the way thralls were supposed to behave. Thralls that acted like thralls were harmless, pitiable things. Thralls that didn't were deadly dangerous, not least because no one expected them to strike.

This one turned away after meeting his eye. It was as though the thrall cared nothing for him. It had been interested when Pterocles was looking down at it, though. What did that mean? Grus hoped it didn't mean the Banished One looked out through the thrall's eyes.

When he asked Pterocles about it, the wizard gave back a vague shrug and answered, “We understand each other, he and I.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Grus demanded. Pterocles only shrugged again.

Grus asked more questions, but Pterocles' answers only got vaguer. At last, the king threw his hands in the air. He went off to his desk to get some work done. If he didn't keep a thumb on Avornis' pulse, who would? Lanius? Grus didn't want his son-in-law getting experience at running the kingdom. He also didn't want Pterocles staying close to the thralls if he wasn't there. He made sure the wizard came away with him. Pterocles looked unhappy, but didn't argue.

When Grus sat down behind the great marble-topped desk from which Kings of Avornis had administered their realm for years uncounted, he found a leather courier's sack on top of it. A note on a scrap of parchment was tied to it.
Brought back from the land of the Chernagors,
it said.
Letters inside with seals still intact.

“What the …?” Grus muttered. Then he snapped his fingers. This had to be the bundle he'd gotten just before learning the Chernagors from the eastern city-states were marching on his army. What with everything that had happened since, he'd forgotten all about it. Some diligent clerk hadn't.

He thought about chucking the sack. What were the odds any of the letters would matter? In the end, though, sighing, he poured the parchments out onto the broad desktop.
I can go through them in a hurry,
he told himself, and popped the wax seal off the first one with his thumbnail.