The Chernagor Pirates (58 page)

“Oh,” Grus said. “I see.” To his disappointment, he
did
see. “You make more sense than I wish you did.”

“Sorry, Your Majesty,” Hirundo replied. “I'll try not to let it happen again.”

“A likely story,” Grus said. “All right, then. If you don't want to attack in a rainstorm, what about one of the fogs that come off the Northern Sea? Do you think that would be any better?”

Now Hirundo paused to think it over. “It might, yes, if you've given up on starving Vasilko out. Have you?”

“Summer's moving along,” Grus said, which both did and did not answer the question. He continued, “It won't be easy for us to stay here through the winter, and who knows how long Vasilko can hold out?”

“Something to that.” Hirundo sounded willing but not consumed by enthusiasm. “Well, I suppose we could get ready to try. No telling when another one of those fogs will roll in, you know. The more you want one, the longer you're likely to wait.”

“You're probably right,” Grus agreed. “But let's get ready. We'll see how hard they really want to fight for Vasilko.” He hoped the answer was
not very.

How do we keep the Chernagor pirates from descending on our coasts?
Lanius' pen raced across the parchment. Since he'd started writing
How to Be a King
for Crex, he'd discovered he was good at posing broad, sweeping questions. Coming up with answers for them seemed much harder.

He did his best here, as he'd done his best with every one of the questions he'd asked himself. He wrote about keeping the Chernagor city-states divided among themselves, about keeping trade with them strong so they wouldn't want to send out raiders, and about the tall-masted ships Grus had ordered built to match those the men from the Chernagor country used. His pen faltered as he tried to describe those ships. He'd ordered them forth, but he'd never seen anything except river galleys and barges.
I'll have to ask Grus more when he comes back from the north,
he thought, and scribbled a note on the parchment to remind himself to do that.

Once the note was written, the king paused, nibbling on the end of the reed pen. Some scribes used goose quills, but Lanius was better at cutting reeds, and was also convinced they held more ink. Besides, nibbling the end of a goose quill gave you nothing but a mouthful of soggy fluff.

After a few minutes of thought, he came up with another good, broad, sweeping question, and wrote it down to make sure he didn't forget it before he could put it on parchment.
How do we deal with the thralls who may cross into Avornis from the lands of the Menteshe, and with those we may find in the lands the Menteshe rule?

He almost scratched out the last half of the question. It struck him as optimism run wild. In the end, he left it there. He didn't suppose he would have if the nomads weren't fighting one another, but the civil war that had started among them after Prince Ulash died showed no signs of slowing down.

With or without the second half, the question was plenty to keep him thoughtful for some little while. What would Crex or some king who came after him need to know? Lanius warned that, while some escaped thralls came across the Stura seeking freedom, others remained under the Banished One's enchantments in spite of appearances to the contrary, and served as the exiled god's spies.
Or sometimes his assassins,
Lanius thought with a shiver of memory.

Lanius also warned Crex that spells for curing thralls were less reliable than everyone wished they were.
Although,
he wrote,
lately it does seem as though these charms are attended with more success than was hitherto the case.

The king hoped that was true. He looked at what he'd written. He decided he'd qualified it well enough. By the time Crex was old enough to want to look at something like
How to Be a King,
everyone would have a better idea of how effective Pterocles' spells really were.

After getting up and stretching, Lanius decided not to sit down again and go back to the book just then. Instead, he stored the parchment and pen and jar of ink in the cabinet he'd brought into the archives for them. At first, he'd been nervous each time he turned away from the book, wondering if he would be stubborn enough to come back to it later. By now, he'd gotten far enough into it to have some confidence he would keep returning and would, one day, finish, even if that day seemed a long way off.

When he came out of the archives in his plain tunic and breeches, several palace servants walked past without paying him the least attention. That amused him.
Clothes make the man,
he thought. Without them, he seemed just another servant himself.

When Bubulcus hurried past, oblivious to the rank of the nondescript fellow in the even more nondescript clothes, Lanius almost called him back. Showing the toplofty servant he didn't know everything there was to know always tempted the king. But Lanius didn't feel like listening to Bubulcus' whined excuses—or to his claims that of course he'd known who Lanius was all along. Bubulcus, after all, had never made a mistake in his life, certainly not in his own mind.

Otus, now, Otus was a different story. The former thrall liberated by Pterocles' magic seemed glad to be alive, glad to know he
was
alive. If he made a mistake, he just laughed about it. And, when Lanius came to his guarded room, he knew who the king was. Bowing low, he murmured, “Your Majesty.”

“Hello, Otus,” Lanius said. “How are you today?”

The thrall straightened, a broad smile on his face. “I'm fine, thank you. Couldn't be better. Isn't it a
good
day?”

To Lanius, it seemed a day no different from any other. But then, Lanius hadn't lived almost his entire life under the shadow of thralldom. To Otus, today
was
different from most of the days he'd known, not least because he knew it so much more completely. Lanius said, “I've got a question for you.”

“Go ahead,” Otus said. If he noticed the guards who flanked King Lanius, he gave no sign. Lanius still didn't trust the magic that had lifted the dark veil of thralldom. Did something of the Banished One lurk beneath the freed thrall's sunny exterior? There had been no sign of it, but that didn't mean it wasn't there.

Besides Otus' behavior, there was other evidence against any lingering influence from the Banished One in him. The other thralls in the royal palace had calmly and quietly killed themselves before Pterocles could try his magic on them. Didn't that argue that the Banished One feared its power? Probably. But was he ruthless enough and far-seeing enough to sacrifice a pair of thralls to leave his opponents thinking they'd gained an advantage they didn't really have? Again, probably. And so … bodyguards.

Lanius asked, “Do you really think we could free a lot of thralls using the spells that freed you?” Otus was the only one here who knew from the inside out what being a thrall was like. If his answer couldn't be fully trusted, it had to be considered.

“I sure hope so, Your Majesty,” Otus answered. Then he grinned sheepishly. “But that wasn't what you asked, was it?”

“Well, no,” Lanius admitted.

Otus screwed up his face into a parody of deep thought. He finally shrugged and said, “I do think so. If it freed me, I expect it could free anybody. I'm nothing special.”

“You are now,” Lanius told him. Otus laughed. The king was right. But the former thrall also had a point. The longer he was free, the more ordinary he seemed. These days, he sounded like anyone else—anyone from the south, for he did keep his accent. When first coming out of the shadows, he'd had only a thrall's handful of words, and wouldn't have known what to do with more if he had owned them.
He truly must be cured,
Lanius thought, but then, doubtfully,
mustn't he?

Beloyuz came up to King Grus. He pointed toward the walls of Nishevatz. Bowing, the Chernagor nobleman—the Chernagor whom Grus now styled Prince of Nishevatz—asked, “Your Majesty, how long is this army going to do nothing but sit in front of my city-state?”

Grus almost laughed in his face. He had to gnaw on the inside of his lower lip to keep from doing just that. Call Beloyuz the Prince of Nishevatz, and what did he do? Why, he started sounding just like Prince Vsevolod. After a few heartbeats, when Grus was sure he wouldn't say anything outrageous or scandalous, he answered, “Well, Your Highness, we are working on that. We're not ready to move yet, but we are working on it.”

He waited to see if that would satisfy Beloyuz. The Chernagor frowned. He didn't look as glum or disgusted as Vsevolod would have, but he didn't miss by much, either. Suspicion clogging his voice, he said, “You are not just telling me this to make me go away and leave you alone?”

“By King Olor's beard, Your Highness, I am not,” Grus said.

Now Beloyuz didn't answer for a little while. “All right,” he said when he did speak. “I believe you. For now, I believe you.” He bowed to Grus once more and strode away.

With a sigh, Grus walked down to the seashore. Guards flanked him. His shadow stretched out before him. It was longer than it would have been at high summer, and got longer still every day. He understood Beloyuz's worries, for the campaigning season was slipping away like grains of sand through an hourglass. If Nishevatz didn't fall on its own soon, he would have to move against it—either move, or try to press on with the siege through the winter, or give up and go back to Avornis. They were all unappetizing choices.

The weather was as fine as he'd ever seen it up here in the north. He muttered a curse at that, tasting the irony of it. He hadn't been lying to Beloyuz. He and Hirundo kept waiting for one of the famous fogs of the land of the Chernagors to come rolling in to conceal an attack on the walls: They waited and waited, while bright, clear day followed bright, clear day. The Chernagor country would have been a much more pleasant place if its summer days were like this all the time. Even so, Grus would gladly have traded this weather for the more usual murk.

Shorebirds skittered along the beach. Some of them, little balls of gray and white fluff, scooted on short legs right at the edge of the lapping sea. They would poke their beaks down into the sandy mud, every now and then coming away with a prize. Others, larger, waded on legs that made them look as though they were on stilts. Those had longer bills, too, some straight, some drooping down, and some, curiously, curving up.

Grus eyed those last birds and scratched his head, wondering what a bill like that could be good for. He saw no use for it, but supposed it had to have some, or the wading birds would have looked different.

Thanks to the clear weather, he could see a long way when he looked out to the Northern Sea. He spied none of the great ships the other Chernagor city-states had sent during the last siege of Nishevatz. They still feared Pterocles' sorcery.

That left Nishevatz to its own devices. Grus turned toward the gray stone walls that had defied his army for so long. They remained as sturdy as ever. Small in the distance, men moved along them. The Chernagors' armor glinted in the unusually bright sunshine. How hard
would
Vasilko's soldiers fight if he assailed those walls? He scowled. No sure way to know ahead of time. He would have to find out by experiment.

Not today,
Grus thought. Today the Chernagors could see whatever he did, just as he could watch them. If one of the swaddling fogs this coast could breed ever came … then, maybe. But no, not today.

He and his guards weren't the only men walking up the beach. That lean, angular shape could only belong to Pterocles. The wizard waved as he approached. “Good day, Your Majesty,” he called.

“Too good a day, maybe,” Grus answered. “We could do with a spell of worse weather, if you want to know the truth.”

Pterocles only shrugged. “Beware of any man who calls himself a weatherworker. He's lying. No man can do much with the weather. It's too big for a mere man to change. The Banished One … the Banished One is another story.”

Grus suddenly saw the cloudless sky in a whole new light. “Are you saying the Banished One is to blame for this weather?” That gave him a different and more urgent reason for wanting fog.

And his question worried Pterocles. “No, I don't think so,” the wizard answered after a long pause. “I believe I would feel it if he were meddling with the weather, and I don't. But he
could,
if he chose to. An ordinary sorcerer? No.”

“All right. That eases my mind a bit.” Grus turned and looked toward the south. His mind's eye leaped across the land of the Chernagors and across all of Avornis to the Menteshe country south of the Stura River. By all the dispatches that came up from Avornis, Sanjar and Korkut were still clawing away at each other. The princes to either side of what had been Ulash's realm were still tearing meat off its bones, too. By all the signs, the Banished One's attention remained focused on the strife among the people who had chosen him for their overlord.

They aren't thralls, though. They're men,
Grus thought. They might be the Banished One's servants, but they weren't his mindless puppets, weren't his slaves. They worshiped him, but they had their own concerns, their own interests, as well. And, for the moment, those counted for more among them.

That had to infuriate the exiled god. So far, though, the Menteshe seemed to be doing as they pleased in their wars, not as the Banished One would have commanded. His eyes on them, he forgot about Nishevatz, about Vasilko.

“If the Menteshe make peace, or if one of them wins outright …” Grus began.

Pterocles nodded, following his thought perfectly. “If that happens, the Banished One could well look this way again.”

“Frightening to think we depend on strife among our foes,” Grus said.

“At least we have it,” Pterocles replied. “And since we have it, we'd better make the most of it.”