The Chernagor Pirates (31 page)

“Of course,” Lanius echoed. He was too bewildered, too astonished, to find anything else to say. Ortalis? The Ortalis who hunted because he was fond of blood? The Ortalis who hurt women because it excited him?
That
Ortalis was the most wonderful man Limosa had ever met? Something, somewhere, didn't add up. Lanius had no idea what. He did know the only individual to whom he less wanted to be married than he did to Ortalis was the Banished One.

Limosa sighed. “He's so sweet. And he does such marvelous things.” She blushed again, this time a bright, bright red. Lanius only scratched his head. He really did wonder if they were talking about the same Ortalis. If he hadn't seen Grus' son with Limosa, he wouldn't have believed it.

Horse-drawn wagons full of grain rattled along with Grus' army. They didn't slow it down badly, but they did help tie it to the roads. Grus wasn't happy about that, but knew he gained as well as lost from having them along. The Menteshe made a habit of burning farms and fields and anything else they came across. Carrying supplies with him was the only way he could be sure of having them when he needed them most.

The horizon to the south should have been smooth, or gently rolling with the low hills between the valleys of the Nine Rivers. Instead, an ugly brown-black smudge obscured part of it. Pointing that way, Grus said, “We'll find the nomads there.”

Hirundo nodded. “That's how it looks to me, too.” He sent the king a sly smile. “Are you ready to ride into battle, Your Majesty?”

Did
ride
have a little extra stress, or was Grus imagining things? Knowing Hirundo, he probably wasn't. He answered, “I'm as ready as I'm going to be,” and set a hand on his horse's neck. The beast was a placid gelding. It did what Grus wanted it to do, and didn't put up much in the way of argument. That suited him fine. Hirundo rode a stallion. It had more flash, more fire. Grus cared very little about that. To him, a horse with fire was a horse that was all too likely to pitch him out of the saddle and onto the ground headfirst.

He nodded to a trumpeter who rode close by. The man blew
Trot.
The king used his knees and the reins to urge his horse up from a walk. The sooner his men closed with the Menteshe, the better, as far as he was concerned. Prince Ulash's men had already come too far north to suit him.

“Scouts out in the van! Scouts out to the flanks!” Hirundo called. Riders peeled off from the main body of the army and hurried out to take those positions. Grus nodded again. He would have given that command in a moment if Hirundo hadn't. Generations of painful experience fighting the southern nomads had taught Avornis that attacks could come from any direction at any time.

Lanceheads glittered in the sun. His army was split fairly evenly between lancers and archers. If they could come to close quarters with the Menteshe, they would have the edge. More painful experience had taught that closing with the hard-riding nomads wasn't always easy, or even possible.

Grus glanced toward Pterocles. “What of their wizards?” the king asked.

“I don't feel anything … out of the ordinary, Your Majesty,” the wizard said after a pause for thought. After another pause, he added, “Not everything is the way it ought to be, though.”

“What do you mean?” Grus asked. Pterocles only shrugged. Grus tried again, asking, “Why do you say that?” Pterocles gave back another shrug. The king said, “Could it be because you feel the Banished One paying attention to what happens here, where you didn't up by Nishevatz?”

Pterocles jerked, as though someone had stuck him with a pin when he wasn't looking. He nodded. “Yes. It could be. In fact, I think it is. There's … something watching, sure enough.”

“What can you do?”

“What can I do?” Pterocles laughed, more than a little wildly. “I can hope he doesn't notice me, that's what. And a forlorn hope it is, too.” He pulled on the reins and steered his horse away from the king's.

Grus hadn't intended to ask him any more questions anyhow.

Late that afternoon, a scout came galloping back to the king. “Your Majesty! Your Majesty!” he called, his voice cracking with excitement. “We just saw our first Menteshe, Your Majesty!”

“Did you?” Grus said, and the young man nodded, his head jerking up and down, his eyes shining. “Did you catch him? Did you kill him?”

Some of that fervid excitement faded. “No, Your Majesty. I'm sorry. He rode off to the southwest. We sent a few men after him, but he got away.”

“Don't worry about it,” Grus told him. “Plenty more where he came from. And maybe he showed us where some of his friends are.”
If I find them, will the Banished One be brooding over the battlefield?
Grus wondered.
If I don't, though, what am I doing here? Why aren't I just yielding my southern provinces to Prince Ulash?
He couldn't do that, not if he wanted to stay King of Avornis, not if he wanted to be able to stand the sight of his own face whenever he chanced to see a reflection. But he didn't relish going forward, either.

The Avornan army didn't go much farther forward that day. When the army encamped for the night, Grus ringed it with sentries a long way out. “That's very good,” Hirundo said. “That's very good. I remember how much trouble Evren's men gave us at night.”

“So do I,” Grus answered. “That's why I'm doing this.” The Menteshe would sneak close if they could, and pepper a camp with arrows. They didn't do much harm, but they stole sleep soldiers needed.

Despite all the sentries, a handful of nomads did manage to sneak close enough to the main camp to shoot a few arrows at it. They wounded two or three men before shouts roused soldiers who came after them. Then they disappeared into the night. They'd done what they'd come to do.

The disturbance roused Grus. He lost a couple of hours of sleep himself, and was yawning and sandy-eyed when the Avornans set out not long after sunrise. They went past fields the raiders had torched perhaps only the day before. Sour smoke still hung in the air, rasping the lungs and stinging the eyes.

He actually saw his first Menteshe on Avornan soil the next morning. A band of Ulash's riders had slipped past the Avornan sentries, leaving them none the wiser. By the surprise with which the Menteshe reacted to the sight of the whole Avornan army heading their way, they hadn't so much eluded the scouts as bypassed them without either side's noticing.

Despite the way the Menteshe threw up their hands and shouted in their guttural language, they didn't wheel their horses and gallop off as fast as they could go. Instead, they rode toward the Avornans, and started shooting at a range Avornan bows couldn't match.

Grus had seen that before, too, most recently in his fight with Prince Evren's nomads. “Forward!” he shouted to the trumpeters, who blew the appropriate horn call. The Avornans pushed their horses up to a gallop as fast as they could. Grus' own mount thundered forward with the rest. He hoped he could stay aboard the jouncing beast. A fall now wouldn't be embarrassing. It would be fatal.

The Menteshe, vastly outnumbered, were not ashamed to flee. Grus had expected nothing else. They kept shooting over their shoulders, too, and shooting very well. But the Avornans were also shooting now, and some of them had faster horses than the nomads did. Whether the Menteshe liked it or not, their pursuers came into range.

And the Avornans could shoot well, too, even if they didn't carry double-curved bows reinforced with horn and sinew the way Ulash's men did. One nomad after another threw up his hands and crumpled to the ground. A horse went down, too, and the beast just behind fell over it and crashed down. Grus hoped both riders got killed.

The surviving nomads scattered then, galloping wildly in all directions. A few of them might have gotten away, but most didn't. Grus waved to the trumpeters. They blew the signal to rein in. Little by little, the Avornans slowed. Sides heaving, Grus' horse bent its head to crop a wisp of grass.

“Very neat, Your Majesty,” Hirundo called, a grin on his face.

“Do you mean this little skirmish, or do you mean that I managed to stay on the horse?” Grus inquired.

Hirundo's grin got wider. “Whichever you'd rather, of course.”

“I'm prouder of staying on and even keeping up,” the king said. “This little band of Menteshe was nothing special—beating them was like cracking an egg with a sledgehammer. They're scattered over the countryside, raiding and looting. Until they come together again, we'll win some easy victories like this.”

“We want to win as many of them as we can, too, before they
do
come together,” his general said. “The more of them we can get rid of that way, the fewer we'll have to worry about then.”

“I know. Believe me, I know,” Grus said. “And even if we do hit them hard, they spatter like quicksilver. We won't always be able to pursue the way we did here, either. If we split up to go after them, they're liable to jump us instead of the other way around.”

“Well, Your Majesty, you certainly do understand the problem,” Hirundo said. “Now if you can figure out a way to solve it …”

Grus grunted and leaned forward to pat the side of his horse's neck. Avornans had understood the problem ever since the Menteshe boiled up from the south centuries before. The nomads, trained since childhood to ride and to tend their flocks, were simply better horsemen than the Avornans. Not only did they carry more powerful bows, but they could also cover more ground. If Avornis hadn't had the advantage of numbers … Grus didn't care to think about what might have happened then.

Forcing himself to look on the bright side instead, Grus said, “Well, we solved it here, anyhow.”

“So we did.” Hirundo nodded. “How many more times will we have to solve it, though, before we finally drive the Menteshe back over the Stura?”

“I don't know,” Grus answered with a sigh. He didn't even know yet whether the Avornans
could
drive Prince Ulash's men back over the river this year. That was something else he preferred not to think about. With another sigh, he went on, “The other question is, how much damage will they do before we can throw them out? They haven't mounted an invasion like this for years.”

“Yes, and we both know why, or think we do,” Hirundo said. The response made the king no happier. Up until recently, Ulash had seemed both reasonable and peaceable, qualities Grus wasn't in the habit of associating with the Menteshe. But he and his folk reverenced the Banished One—the Fallen Star, they called him. If he told Ulash to cause trouble for Avornis, Ulash would—Ulash had—no matter how reasonable and peaceable he'd seemed for many years.

“I wonder …” Grus said slowly.

“What's that, Your Majesty?” Hirundo asked.

“I wonder if we can do anything to persuade Ulash he'd be better off worshiping the gods in the heavens than the Banished One.”

“I doubt it.” Hirundo, a practical man, sounded like one. “If the Menteshe haven't figured out who the true gods are yet, we can't teach 'em.”

He was probably right, no matter how much Grus wished he were wrong. But things were more complicated than Hirundo realized. King Olor and Queen Quelea and the rest were undoubtedly the gods in the heavens. That made them stronger than the Banished One, yes. Whether it made him any less a true god … was yet another thing Grus would sooner not have contemplated.

That evening, drums boomed in the distance. Grus knew what that meant—the Menteshe were signaling back and forth across the miles. The drumbeats carried far better than horn calls could have. The king wondered what the nomads were saying with those kettledrums. He kicked at the dirt inside his tent. He'd served down in the south for years, but he hadn't learned to make sense of the drums. He knew no Avornans who had.
Too bad,
he thought.

The drums went on all through the night. Grus woke several times, and each time heard them thudding and muttering, depending on how far off they were. Every time he woke, he had more trouble falling back to sleep.

“A letter from King Grus, Your Majesty,” a courier said, and handed King Lanius a rolled and sealed parchment.

“Thank you,” Lanius said in some surprise; he hadn't expected anything from Grus. He broke the wax seal and opened the letter.
King Grus to King Lanius
—
greetings,
he read, and then,
I wonder if you would be kind enough to do me a favor. Does anyone in the royal archives talk about the drum signals the Menteshe use? Does anyone know what the different signals mean? If you can find out, please let me know as quickly as possible. Many thanks for your help.
A scrawled signature completed the letter.

“Is there an answer, Your Majesty?” the courier asked.

“Yes.” Lanius called for parchment, pen, and ink.
King Lanius to Grus
—
greetings,
he wrote; he still hesitated to admit that Grus deserved the royal title. But that reluctance didn't keep him from continuing,
I do not know of any records such as you request, but I have never looked for them, either. I will now, and as soon as I can I will let you know if I find what you want
—
and, for that matter, if I don't.
He signed the letter, sealed it with candle wax and his signet ring, and gave it to the courier. “Take this to Grus in the south. I want him to know I will give it my full attention.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. Thank you, Your Majesty.” The courier bowed and hurried away.

Lanius, bemused, headed straight for the archives. Grus had never asked him for information before. He wondered if he could come up with it. He hoped he could. No Avornan could think of the southern provinces being ravaged without cringing. Lanius might still wish Grus didn't wear the crown. That had nothing to do with whether he wanted Grus to drive the Menteshe out of the kingdom.