The Chernagor Pirates (39 page)

A volley from the Menteshe made several Avornan horsemen pitch from the saddle and crumple to the ground. Wounded horses squealed and screamed. But soon the attacking Menteshe got close enough for Grus' men to shoot back. And they did, with well-disciplined flights of arrows that tore into the invaders' front ranks. “Grus! Grus! King Grus!” the Avornans cried.

Then it wasn't just arrows anymore. It was swords and javelins and lances. It was men shouting and cursing and shrieking at the top of their lungs. It was iron belling off iron, iron striking sparks from iron, the hot iron stink of blood in the air. It was cut and hack and slash and thrust—and, for Grus, it was hoping he could stay alive.

He cut at a Menteshe. Along with a shirt of boiled leather that turned arrows almost as well as a mailcoat, the fellow wore a close-fitting iron cap. Grus' blow jammed it down onto his forehead; the cut from the rim made blood run down into his eyes. He yammered in pain and yanked the iron cap back up with his left hand. But Grus struck again a heartbeat later. His sword crunched into the nomad's cheek. He felt the blow all the way up into his shoulder. Face a gory mask, the Menteshe slid off over his horse's tail.

Another nomad hacked at Grus. He managed to block the blow with his shield. He felt that one all the way to the shoulder, too, and knew his shield arm would be bruised and sore come morning. But if he hadn't turned the blade aside, it would have bitten into his ribs. He hoped his mailshirt and the padding beneath would have kept it out of his vitals, but that wasn't the sort of thing anybody wanted to find out the hard way.

An Avornan to Grus' left engaged the Menteshe before he could slash at the king again. An arrow hissed past Grus' head, the sound of its passage as malignant as a wasp's buzz—and its sting, if it had struck home, far more deadly.

For a little while, he worried that the nomads' fear and desperation would fire them to break through his battle line. But the Avornans held, and then began pushing Ulash's riders back toward the Anapus regardless of whether they wanted to go that way. When the marines from the river galleys and the catapults on the ships began galling them again, they broke, riding off wildly in all directions.

“After them!” Grus croaked. He took a swig from his water bottle to lay the dust in his throat, then shouted out the command. Still crying out his name, the Avornans thundered after their foes. Some of the Menteshe got away, but many fell.

Hirundo was bleeding from a cut on the back of his sword hand. He didn't even seem to know he had the wound. “Not bad, Your Majesty,” he said. “Not bad at all, by the gods. We hurt 'em bad this time.”

“Yes,” Grus said. “It's only fair—they've done the same to us.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

King Lanius sat on the Diamond Throne. The weight of the royal crown was heavy on his head. His most splendid royal robes, shot through with gold threads and encrusted with jewels and pearls, were as heavy as a mailshirt. Down below his high seat, royal bodyguards clutched swords and spears. The men were as nervous as big, tough farm dogs when wolves came near. And Lanius was nervous, too. He hadn't expected an embassy from the Chernagor city-state of Durdevatz. Men from Durdevatz had brought him his monkeys. In those days, though, peace had reigned between the Chernagors and Avornis. Things were different now.

But how different were they? Lanius himself didn't know. From what he did know, Durdevatz wasn't one of the city-states that had helped resupply Nishevatz when Grus besieged it. Who could say for certain what had happened since then, though? No one could—which explained why the guards clung so tightly to their weapons.

And along with the guards stood a pair of wizards tricked out in helmets and mailshirts, shields and swords. They wouldn't be worth much in a fight, but the disguise might help them cast their spells if any of the Chernagors in the embassy tried to loose magic against the king.

Would the men from Durdevatz do such a thing? Lanius didn't know that, either. All he knew was, he didn't want to find out the hard way that he should have had sorcerers there.

A stir at the far end of the throne room. Courtiers' heads swung that way. The envoys from Durdevatz came toward the throne. They were large, burly men with proud hooked noses, thick dark curly beards, and black hair worn in neat buns at the napes of their necks. They wore linen shirts enlivened by fancy embroidery at the chest and shoulders, wool knee-length kilts with checks on dark backgrounds, and boots that reached halfway up their calves. They all had very hairy legs, judging by the bits that showed between boot tops and kilts.

Their leader wore the fanciest shirt of all. He bowed low to Lanius, low enough to show the bald spot on top of his head. “Greetings, Your Majesty,” he said in fluent but gutturally accented Avornan.

“Greetings to you.” As he went through the formula of introduction with the ambassador, Lanius kept his voice as noncommittal as he could. “You are …?”

“My name is Kolovrat, Your Majesty,” the ambassador from Durdevatz replied. “I bring you not only my own greetings but also those of my overlord, Prince Ratibor, and also the greetings of all the other princes of the Chernagors.”

A brief murmur ran through the throne room. Lanius would have murmured, too, if he hadn't been sitting on the Diamond Throne before everyone's eye. “Prince.… Ratibor?” he said. “What, ah, happened to Prince Bolush?” Asking a question like that broke protocol, but no one in Avornis had heard that Bolush had lost his throne.

Kolovrat didn't seem put out at the question. “A hunting accident, Your Majesty,” he replied. “Very sad.”

Lanius wondered how accidental the accident had been. He also wondered where Ratibor and Kolovrat stood on any number of interesting and important questions. For now, though, formula prevailed. He said, “I am pleased to accept Prince Ratibor's greetings along with your own.”
Am I? Well, I'll find out.
He didn't mention the other Chernagor princes. For one thing, Kolovrat had no real authority to speak for them. For another, at least half of them were at war with Avornis at the moment.

“In my prince's name, I thank you, Your Majesty.” Kolovrat bowed.

“I am pleased to have gifts for you and your comrades,” Lanius said. A courtier handed leather sacks to the ambassador and the other Chernagors.

“I thank you again,” Kolovrat said with another bow. “And I am pleased to have gifts for you as well, Your Majesty.”

Now all the courtiers leaned forward expectantly. Lanius had gotten not only his first monkeys but also his first pair of moncats from Chernagor envoys. Those earlier ambassadors had been at least as much merchants as they were diplomats. Lanius thought Kolovrat really did come straight from Prince Ratibor.

The king's guardsmen and the wizards masquerading as guardsmen also leaned forward, ready to protect Lanius if this embassy turned out to be an elaborate disguise for an assassination attempt. That had occurred to the king, too. For once, he wished the Diamond Throne didn't elevate him to quite such a magnificent height. Sitting on it, he made a good target.

But when one of the Chernagors standing behind Kolovrat opened a box, no arrows or sheets of flame or spiny, possibly poisonous monsters burst from it. Instead, it held … Were those, could those be … parchments?

Kolovrat said, “Prince Ratibor discovered these old writings in the cathedral after the High Hallow of Durdevatz set the princely crown upon his head. He has heard of your fondness for such things, and sends them to you with his warmest esteem and compliments.”

The guardsmen relaxed. So did the wizards. Whatever Ratibor thought about Lanius, he didn't seem inclined to murder him. The Avornan courtiers drew back with dismay bordering on disgust. Old parchments? Not a lot interesting about
them
!

Lanius? Lanius beamed. “Thank you very much!” he exclaimed. “Please give my most sincere thanks to His Highness as well. I look forward to finding out what these old parchments say. They're from the cathedral, you tell me?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Kolovrat nodded.

“How … interesting.” Now the king could hardly wait to get his hands on the documents. Parchments from the cathedral at Durdevatz could be very old indeed. Lanius wondered if they went back to the days before the Chernagors swooped down on the coast of the Northern Sea and took the towns there away from Avornis. That didn't seem likely, but it wasn't impossible, either.

“I am sure your pleasure will delight Prince Ratibor.” Kolovrat said all the right things. He still sounded more than a little amazed, though, that Lanius was pleased with the present.

That amazement made Lanius curious. “How did Prince Ratibor know I would like this gift so well?” he asked.

“How, Your Majesty? Prince Ratibor is a clever man. That is how,” Kolovrat answered. “And he knows you too are a clever man. He knows you will aid Durdevatz in her hour of need.”

Aha. Now we come down to it,
Lanius thought. He hadn't supposed Ratibor had sent an embassy just for the sake of sending one—and Ratibor evidently hadn't. “What does your prince want from Avornis?” the king asked cautiously.

“Nishevatz and the city-states allied with Nishevatz harry us,” Kolovrat said. “Without help, we do not know how long we can stay free. We fear what will come if we lose our struggle. Vasilko is the Prince of Nishevatz, but everyone knows who Vasilko's prince is.”

He means the Banished One,
Lanius thought unhappily. He wished the new Prince of Durdevatz had come to him with some foolish, trivial request, something he could either grant or refuse with no twinge of conscience. Whatever he did now, he would have more than twinges. “Tell me what Prince Ratibor wants from us,” he said. “I do not know how much I can give. We are at war in the south, you know. Avornis itself is invaded.”

“Yes. I know this,” Kolovrat said. “But what you can do, with soldiers or ships, Prince Ratibor hopes you will. Durdevatz is hard pressed. If you can send us any aid at all, we will be ever grateful to the rich and splendid Kingdom of Avornis. So my prince swears, by all the gods in the heavens.”

Not too long before, in the archives, Lanius had come across a copy of a letter from his father to some baron or another. That happened every so often; it never failed to give him an odd feeling. He'd been a little boy when King Mergus died, and didn't remember him well. Surviving documents helped him understand the cynical but sometimes oddly charming man who'd sired him.

The Avornan noble had apparently promised King Mergus eternal gratitude if he would do something for him. And Mergus had written back,
Gratitude, Your Excellency, is worth its weight in gold.

That came back to Lanius now, though he rather wished it wouldn't have. But sometimes things needed doing regardless of whether the people for whom you did them could ever properly repay you. The king feared this would be one of those times. He said, “When you go back to Durdevatz, tell him Avornis will do what it can for him. I don't know what that will be, not yet, but we'll do it.”

Kolovrat bowed very low. “May the gods bless you, Your Majesty.”

“Yes,” Lanius said, wondering how he would meet the promise he'd just made. “May they bless me indeed.”

Grus was questioning prisoners when a courier came down from the north. Quite a few Menteshe spoke at least a little Avornan, and the nomads were often breathtakingly candid about what they wanted to do to Avornis. “We will pasture our flocks and our herds in your meadows,” a chieftain declared. “We will kill your peasants—kill them or make them into thralls, whichever suits us better. Your cities will be our cities. We will worship the Fallen Star, the true light of the world, in your cathedrals.”

“Really? Then how did we happen to capture you?” Grus asked in mild tones.

With a blithe shrug—surprisingly blithe, considering that he was a captive—the fellow answered, “I made a mistake. It happens to all of us. You, for instance”—he pointed at Grus—“do not bow before the Fallen Star. You will pay for your mistake, and worse than I have paid for mine.”

“Oh?” Grus said. “Suppose I kill you now?”

Another shrug. “Even then.” As far as Grus could tell, that wasn't bravado. The Menteshe meant it. Scowling, the king gestured to the guards who surrounded the prisoner. They took him away. But his confidence lingered. It worried Grus. As far as he could tell, all the nomads felt that way. It made them more dangerous than they would have been if they'd had the same sort of doubts he did.

And yet, no matter how confident they were, he'd driven them back a long way and inflicted some stinging defeats on them. As soon as he cleared them from the valley of the Anapus, he could move down to the Stura and drive them off Avornan soil altogether. He hoped he would be able to do that before winter ended campaigning. He didn't want the Menteshe lingering in Avornis until spring. That would be a disaster, nothing less.

What they'd already done was disastrous enough. Because of their devastation, crops here in the south were going to be only a fraction of normal. Pelagonia wasn't the only city liable to see hunger this winter—far from it. And how were farmers supposed to pay their taxes when they had no crops to sell for cash? The government of Avornis would see hunger this winter, too.

And all that said nothing about men killed, women violated, children orphaned, livestock slaughtered. Every time he thought about it, he seethed. What he wanted to do was go after the Menteshe south of the Stura, take the fighting to them, and let them see how they liked it.

What he wanted to do and what he could do were two different things. Until he had—until Avornis had—some reliable way to cure thralls and to keep men from being made into thralls, he didn't dare cross the river. Defeat would turn into catastrophe if he did. And then his son and his son-in-law would fight over who succeeded him. That would be another catastrophe, no matter who won. Grus had his own opinion about who would, had it and refused to dwell on it.