The Chernagor Pirates (32 page)

“Drum signals,” Lanius muttered. He knew where a lot of old parchments that had to do with the Menteshe in one way or another were stored. Maybe he could find what Grus wanted in among them.

He spent the rest of the day trying, but had no luck. He did discover there were even more documents in those crates than he'd thought. He vanished back into the archives after breakfast, and didn't come out again until suppertime.

When he disappeared early the following morning, too, Sosia called after him, “I hope I'll see you again before too long.”

“That's right,” answered Lanius, who'd only half heard her. Sosia laughed and shook her head; she'd seen such fits take her husband before.

He found the best light he could in the archives. No one ever did a proper job of cleaning the skylights far above, which left the dusty daylight in there all the more wan and shifting. Lanius had complained about that before. He wondered whether complaining again would do any good. He had his doubts.

Then he started going through the parchments once more, and forgot about skylights and everything else but the work at hand. He had no trouble finding parchments mentioning the Menteshe drums. The Avornans hadn't needed long to realize the nomads didn't pound them for amusement alone. But what they meant? That was a different question.

The more Lanius read, the more annoyed he got.
Why
hadn't his countrymen paid more attention to the drums? More than a few of them, traders and soldiers, had learned the spoken and written language of the Menteshe. Why hadn't anyone bothered to learn their drum signals? Or, if someone had, why hadn't he bothered to write them down?

Lanius kept plugging away. He learned all sorts of interesting things about the Menteshe, things he'd never known or things he'd seen once before and then forgotten. He learned the commands a Menteshe used with a draft horse. Those fascinated him, but they had nothing to do with what Grus wanted.

I can't come up empty,
Lanius told himself.
I just can't.
If he failed here, Grus would never ask him for anything again. As though that weren't bad enough, the other king would despise the archives. Lanius took that as personally as though Grus were to despise his children.

And then, half an hour later, the king let out a whoop that echoed through the big archives chamber. He held a report by a soldier who'd served along the Stura in the reign of his own great-great-great-grandfather. The man had carefully described each drum signal the Menteshe used and what it meant.

After making a copy of the report, Lanius left the chamber. He scribbled a note to go with the copy, sealed them both, and gave them to a courier for the long journey south.

“You look pleased with yourself,” Sosia answered when he went back to the royal chambers in triumph.

“I am,” Lanius answered, and then looked down at the dusty finery he wore. “But the servants won't be pleased with me. I forgot to change before I went into the archives.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Well, well.” Grus eyed the parchment he'd just unrolled. “King Lanius came through for us.”

Hirundo looked over his shoulder. “He sure did,” the general agreed. “This was in the archives?”

“That's what the note with it says,” Grus answered.

“If we knew this once upon a time, I wonder why we forgot,” Hirundo said.

“A spell of peace probably lasted longer than any one man's career,” Grus said. “The people who knew wouldn't have passed it on to the younger officers who needed to know, and so the chain got broken.”

“That makes sense,” Hirundo said.

“Which doesn't mean it's true, of course,” Grus said. “How many things that seem to make perfect sense turn out not to have anything to do with what looks sensible?”

“Oh, a few,” his general replied. “Yes, just a few.”

“We don't have to worry about tracking down the whys and wherefores here,” Grus said with a certain relief. “If what Lanius says in that note is true, it happened a long time ago.”

“Now that we have what we need, though, let's see what we can do about giving the Menteshe a surprise,” Hirundo said.

“Oh, yes.” Grus nodded. “That's the idea.”

The drums started thumping at sunset that day. In the evening twilight, Grus peered down at the list of calls Lanius had sent him. Three beats, pause, two beats … That meant
west.
Five quick beats was
assemble.
Having found those meanings, the king started laughing. Knowing what the drums meant helped him less than he'd hoped it would. Yes, Ulash's men were to assemble somewhere off to the west. But
where?

Grus snapped his fingers.
He
didn't know; this wasn't a part of Avornis with which he was intimately familiar. But the army had soldiers from all parts of Avornis in it. He called for runners, gave them quick orders, and sent them on their way through the encampment.

Inside half an hour, they came back with four soldiers, all of them from farms and towns within a few miles of where the army had camped. They bowed low before the king. “Never mind that nonsense,” Grus said impatiently, which made their eyes widen in surprise. “If you were going to gather a large force of horsemen somewhere within a day's ride west of here, where would you do it?”

They looked surprised again, but put their heads together even so. After a few minutes of talk, they all nodded. One of them pointed southwest. “Your Majesty, there's a meadow just this side of the Aternus, before it runs into the Cephisus.” The latter was one of the Nine. The soldier went on, “It's got good grazing—Olor's beard, sir, it's got wonderful grazing—the whole year around. It's about half a day's ride that way.”

“Can you guide us to it?” Grus asked. The man nodded. So did his comrades. And so did the king. “All right, then. Every one of you will do that come morning. You'll all have a reward, too. Keep quiet about this until then, though.”

The men loudly promised they would. Grus hoped so, though he wasn't overoptimistic. His father had always said two men could keep a secret if one of them was dead, and that, if three men tried, one was likely a fool and the other two spies. After leaving a farm not impossibly far from here, his father had come to the city of Avornis and served as a royal guard, so he'd seen enough intrigue to know what he was talking about.

After sending away the soldiers, Grus summoned Hirundo and Pterocles. He explained what he had in mind. “Can we do this?” he asked.

“A little risky,” Hirundo said. “More than a little, maybe. We'll look like idiots if the Menteshe catch on. We may look like
dead
idiots if they catch on.”

Grus nodded. He'd already figured that out for himself. He turned to Pterocles. “Can you mask us, or mask some of us?”

“Some of us,” the wizard answered. “It would have to be some of us. All?” He rolled his eyes. “That would be an impossibly large job for any human wizard.”

“Do the best you can,” Grus told him. “I don't expect you to do more than a human wizard's capable of.”

“All right, Your Majesty,” Pterocles said.

“You're going ahead with this scheme, Your Majesty?” Hirundo asked.

“Yes,” Grus said. “If it works, we'll give Ulash's men a nasty surprise.”
And if it doesn't, they'll give us one.
He refused to worry—too much—about that. By its nature, war involved risk. The gamble here seemed good to the king. If they won, they would win a lot.

They rode out before sunrise the next morning, the men from close by leading the two divisions into which Grus had split the army. Out of a certain sense of fairness, Grus sent Pterocles off with the division Hirundo led. The king hadn't ridden far before regretting his generosity. If Pterocles had come with him, he would have had a better chance of staying alive.

No help for it now, though. As Grus had told his guides to do, they led him and his men on a looping track that would take them around to strike the Menteshe from the west—if the Menteshe were there. Whether they struck them at the same time as Hirundo's men did was going to be largely a matter of luck.

One of the guards pointed. “There, Your Majesty! Look!”

They'd guessed right. Prince Ulash's nomads were gathering on the meadow. Grus knew exactly the moment when they realized the large force approaching wasn't theirs but Avornan. So ants boiled after their hill was kicked.

“Forward!” Grus shouted to the trumpeters. As the fierce horn calls clove the air, he set spurs to his gelding. The horse whinnied in pained protest. Grus roweled it again. It bounded ahead. He drew his sword. The sun flashed fire from the blade. “Forward!” he yelled once more.

Some of the Menteshe started shooting. Others fled. King Grus doubted the nomads were under any sort of unified command. Each chieftain—maybe even each horseman—decided for himself what he would do. That made the Menteshe hard for Avornis to control. It also made them hard for their own warlords to control.

The Avornans shot back as soon as they came within range. A few of them had already pitched from the saddle. But Ulash's warriors began falling, too. Soon the Menteshe still hale started fleeing. They had never seen any shame in running away when the odds seemed against them.

Grus brandished the sword, though he had yet to come within fifty feet of a foe. Where were Hirundo and Pterocles and the other division? Had the wizard masked them so well, they'd disappeared altogether? Had the Banished One swept them off the field, as a man might have removed them from a gaming board? Or had their guides simply gotten lost?

No sooner had Grus begun to worry than the other Avornan force appeared, as suddenly as though a fog in front of them had blown away. His own men burst into cheers. The Menteshe, suddenly caught between hammer and anvil, cried out in dismay. They all tried to flee now, shooting over their shoulders as they desperately galloped off.

A lot of the nomads did escape. Grus never had to use his sword. Somehow, none of that mattered much. Many Menteshe lay dead. Looking around, the king could see that his own force hadn't suffered badly.

Hirundo saw the same thing. “We hurt 'em this time, your Majesty,” the general said, riding up to Grus.

“That's what we set out to do,” Grus replied, though he knew the Avornans didn't always do what they set out to do against the Menteshe. “Where's Pterocles? He kept you hidden, all right.”

“He sure did,” Hirundo said enthusiastically. “Even I didn't know where we were until just before we got here.” He looked around, then scratched his head. “I don't know where he's gotten to now, though.” His shrug might have been apology.

Grus also eyed the field. His men, swords drawn, were moving over it. They plundered the dead Menteshe and cut the throats of the wounded nomads they found. Had the fight gone against them, the invaders would have done, the same, though they would have reserved some Avornans for torment before death's mercy came. Here a trooper held up a fine sword with a glittering edge, there another displayed a purse nicely heavy with coins, in another place a man threw on a fur-edged cape not badly bloodstained.

Several Avornans picked up recurved Menteshe bows. One fitted an arrow to the string, then tried to draw the shaft back to his ear. At the first pull, he didn't use enough strength. His friends jeered. Gritting his teeth, he tried again. This time, the bow bent. He turned it away from his fellows and let fly. They all exclaimed in surprise at how far the arrow flew.

“There's the wizard!” Hirundo pointed as Pterocles emerged from a clump of bushes. “I thought the rascal had gone and disappeared himself this time.”

When Grus waved, Pterocles nodded back and made his way toward the king. Grus clasped his hand and slapped him on the back. Pterocles, none too steady on his feet, almost fell over. Holding him up, Grus said, “Well done!”

“Er—thank you, Your Majesty.” Pterocles did not sound like a man who'd just helped win a good-sized victory. He sounded more like one who'd had too much to drink and was about to sick up much of what he'd poured down. His greenish color suggested the same.

“Are you all right?” Grus asked.

Pterocles shrugged. “If you love me, Your Majesty—or even if you hate me, but not too much—do me the courtesy of never asking me to use that masking spell against the Menteshe again.” He gulped, and then ran back into the bushes from which he'd just emerged. When he came out again, his face was deathly pale, but he looked better. He might have gotten rid of some of what ailed him.

“Your spell here helped us win,” Grus said, surprised and puzzled. “Why not use it again?”

“Why not?” The wizard took a deep breath—almost a sob. “I'll tell you why not, Your Majesty. I was holding the spell against the Menteshe horsemen. Thus far, well and good. Then I was holding it against Ulash's wizards, which was not such an easy thing, but I managed well enough. But soon I was also holding it against the Banished One—and gods spare me from ever having to do that again.” He sat down on the ground; his legs didn't seem to want to hold him up anymore.

“But you did it.” The king squatted beside him.

“Oh, yes. I did it.” Pterocles' voice was hollow, not proud. “He didn't take the spell seriously, you might say, until too late. By the time he grew fully aware of it and realized it might hurt his followers, it already had. He doesn't make mistakes twice. He doesn't make many mistakes once.”

And what would you expect from a foe who was a god?
Grus wondered. But Pterocles already knew about that—not all about it, but enough. “It will be as you say,” Grus promised, and the wizard's shoulders sagged with relief.

The forest smelled clean and green. When King Lanius was in the city of Avornis, he didn't notice the mingled stinks of dung and smoke and unwashed people crowded too close together. When he left, which wasn't often enough, the air seemed perfumed in his nostrils. He relished each inhalation and regretted every breath he had to let out. He also regretted having to go back to the capital when this day ended. He knew he would smell the stench he usually ignored.