The Bastard King

by Harry Turtledove

  No such luck. Nicator knew that had to mean something, and asked, “What is it, Skipper?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Grus answered. “I can almost hear the Banished One laughing from here, that’s what.” He held up his cup to show the nearest barmaid it was empty, then proceeded to get very drunk.

  King Mergus strode through the royal palace in the city of Avornis in the center of a bubble of silence. Whenever servants or courtiers or soldiers saw him coming, they jerked apart from one another, bowed with all the respect they were supposed to show, and stayed frozen as statues till he’d passed. Then they started up again, talking behind his back.

  He’d tried catching them at it a couple of times. He could, but the sport soon palled. They didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed.

  The real trouble began a few days after Hallow Perdix made the king’s concubine queen. Mergus came up a corridor at the same instant that his brother, Prince Scolopax, started down it from the other end.

  They both stopped for half a heartbeat when they saw each other, and then both kept walking. Mergus braced himself, as though heading into battle—and so he was.

  For close to thirty years, Mergus had ruled Avornis. For close to thirty years, his younger brother had been a spare wheel—and a mistrusted spare wheel, at that. With nothing useful to do, Scolopax had thrown himself into drink and dissipation. These days, he looked ten years older than the king.

  With a grim nod, Mergus started to walk past Scolopax. “You bastard,” his brother said, breathing wine fumes into his face. “You and your bastard.”

  A couple of servants had been walking along the passageway, too. They froze and turned back toward the king and his brother, staring as they might have stared after the first warning rumble of an avalanche. King Mergus hardly noticed them. If his look could have killed, Scolopax would have lain dead on the floor. “Call me what you choose—” Mergus began.

  Prince Scolopax glared back with loathing all the greater for being, unlike Mergus, impotent. “If I did, your bones would catch fire inside your stinking carcass.”

  Mergus went on as though his brother hadn’t spoken: “—but Lanius is my legitimate son and heir, being the child of my lawfully wedded wife.”

  Scolopax’s scornful snort sounded as though he were breaking wind. “Throw seven and you’ll win at dice. At marriage?” He made that rude, rude noise again. “How much did you pay Perdix the pimp, besides promotion?”

  “He won promotion on his merits, and I paid him not a copper halfpenny.” Mergus lied without hesitation.

  Scolopax’s laugh was more a howl of pain. He shook a long, bony finger under the king’s nose. “All right. All right, gods curse you. Olor has six, but you think you’re entitled to more. But I tell you this, my dear brother.” A viper could have given the word no more venom. Shaking his finger again, Scolopax went on, “I tell you this: Whether you have that bastard or not, I know who’s going to rule Avornis when you’re stinking in your grave. Me, that’s who!” He jabbed his thumb at his own chest.

  “Do you hear that sound?” King Mergus cupped a hand behind his ear. Scolopax frowned. But for their two angry voices, the corridor was silent. Mergus answered his own question anyhow. “That’s the Banished One, licking his chops.”

  The prince went death pale. “You dare,” he whispered. “You dare, when the Banished One whispered in your ear, telling you to wed your whore in spite of all that’s right and prop—”

  He ducked then, just in time. Mergus’ right fist whistled past his ear. But Mergus’ left caught him in the belly and doubled him up. Scolopax hit the king in the face. The two old men—the two brothers—stood toe to toe, hammering away at each other with every bit of strength that was in them.

  Their quarrel had drawn more servants to the corridor. “Your Majesty!” cried some of those men, while others said, “Your Highness!” They all rushed toward the king and the prince and got between them so they couldn’t reach each other anymore.

  “I’ll have your head for this!” Mergus shouted at Scolopax.

  “It’s better than the one you’ve got now!” Scolopax shouted back.

  And Mergus knew his threat was idle, empty. However much he wanted to be rid of his brother forever, he knew he couldn’t kill him, not unless Scolopax did something far worse than giving him a black eye (he’d bloodied his brother’s nose, he saw with no small satisfaction). He didn’t have many years left himself. With Scolopax gone and his son a child, who would rule Avornis after him? A regency council—and the only thing Mergus feared more was the Banished One in all his awful majesty. If there was a better recipe for paralyzing the kingdom than a squabbling regency council, no one had found it yet.

  Scolopax dabbed blood from his upper lip with a silken kerchief. “You maniac,” he panted. “If you had the Scepter of Mercy, you’d bash people’s brains in with it.”

  “If I had the Scepter of Mercy—” Mergus stood there panting, trying to get enough air. He scowled at Scolopax, feeling all the bruises his brother had given him. He tried again. “If I had it—” That was no good, either; he had to stop for a second time. “Get out of my sight,” he said thickly, rage almost choking him.

  He was closer to taking his brother’s head for that remark than for all the bruises he’d had from the prince. And Scolopax had to know as much, too. He shook himself free of servants and courtiers and left Mergus without another word.

  “Your Majesty—” one of the servants began.

  “Go away,” Mergus said. “Leave me.” One advantage of being king was that, when he said such things, people obeyed him. The corridor emptied as though by magic.

  But that proved less helpful than Mergus had hoped. It left him alone with his thoughts—and with his brother’s final mocking words.

  If I had the Scepter of Mercy … His shoulders slumped. He sighed. No King of Avornis had looked on, let alone held, the great talisman for four hundred years. It had been on procession in the south, to hearten the people against the Banished One and against the fierce Menteshe who did his bidding (and who, then, were newly come to the borders of Avornis), when a band of nomads, riding faster than the wind, swooped down on its guardsmen and raped it away. These days, it stayed in Yozgat, the capital of the strongest Menteshe principality.

  The Banished One couldn’t do anything with the Scepter. If he could have, he surely would have by now. And if ever the Banished One found the power to wield it, he wouldn’t merely storm the city of Avornis. He would storm back into the heavens themselves. So the priests said, and King Mergus knew no reason to disbelieve them.

  But even if the Banished One couldn’t hold the Scepter in his fist, he kept the kings of Avornis from using it for the good of the kingdom. Mergus thought his distant predecessors had taken its power for granted. People often did, when they’d had something marvelous for a long time.

  I wouldn’t. If the Scepter of Mercy came to me, I’d do right by it. He laughed a sad and bitter laugh. Surely every king of Avornis for the past four centuries had had that same thought. And how much good had it done any of them? Exactly none, as Mergus knew all too well.

  “Fire beacon!” Turnix called. The wizard pointed to a hilltop north of the Stura atop which, sure enough, a big bonfire had flared into life.

  “I see it,” Grus answered. “The Menteshe are loose, gods curse them.”

  Nicator also peered toward the north. “Now—let’s see exactly whereabouts and how bad it is.”

  Three more, smaller, signal fires sprang to life to the west of the first one. “That way—a medium-sized raid,” Grus said. Five would have meant a major invasion—a war. Grus pointed west. “We’ll see what the next beacon tells us.” He set a hand on Nicator’s shoulder. “Pass out weapons to the rowers. Who knows what sort of fighting we’ll be doing?”

  “Right you are, Skipper,” Nicator answered, and saw to it.

  Propelled by sails and oars, the Tigerfish sped down the river toward the trouble.
The next flaring fire beacon still urged it toward the west. “We’re on the way to Anxa,” Grus murmured, disquieted.

  “And so?” his lieutenant said. Then, perhaps a moment slower than he should have, he caught on. “Oh. That thrall we handed over to the wizards there. Don’t you think they should have figured out whether he was dangerous or not?”

  “Yes, I think they should have,” Grus told him. “Trouble is, I don’t know whether they did.”

  “Well, even if they didn’t, how much trouble could one thrall cause?” Nicator asked.

  “I don’t know that, either. I hope nobody’s finding out.”

  He watched anxiously for the smoke rising from the next beacon, which stood on a hill north of the riverside town. The smoke didn’t always predict what the fires themselves would say, but he’d gotten good at gauging it. Even before he saw the flames showing that trouble lay due north hereabouts, the way the smoke rose made him think they would tell him that. He also spied smoke rising from places that did not hold fire beacons. The Menteshe burned for the sport of it.

  Just before he came in to the town of Anxa (which, thanks to its wall, remained in Avornan hands), a young officer on horseback waved to him from the northern bank of the Stura. The sun glinted off the fellow’s chain-mail shirt and conical helm. “Ahoy, the river galley!” he shouted.

  Grus waved back to show he’d heard. “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” he yelled back—the plumes of the officer’s crest were dyed blue.

  “We’ll be driving the wild men back this way before long,” the young officer answered. “Driving ’em out of Avornis is one thing. Making sure they don’t do this again … that’s something else, something a lot better.”

  “I like the way he thinks,” Nicator said in a voice too low for the lieutenant to hear.

  “So do I.” Grus nodded, then cupped his hands to his mouth once more to shout over to the riverbank. “We’ll do our best, Lieutenant. What’s your name?”

  “Hirundo. Who’re you?”

  “I’m Grus,” Grus answered, adding, “Now we both know where to lay the blame if things go wrong.”

  Hirundo laughed. “Here’s hoping we don’t have to,” he said. “Stay there, if you can. I’ll do my best to push the Menteshe your way.” Before Grus could reply, Hirundo wheeled his horse and rode away from the river, up toward the fighting.

  “Think he can do it?” Nicator asked.

  “You never can tell. A million things might go wrong,” Grus said. “He might get an arrow in his face half an hour from now. But if he doesn’t, I think he’s got a pretty fair chance.”

  Nicator nodded. “I was thinking the same thing. Hirundo, eh? He’s still wet behind the ears, but that might be a name worth remembering.”

  “Let’s see how he does. That’ll tell us more,” Grus said. His lieutenant nodded again.

  Before they found out what to make of the lieutenant, two more river galleys came rowing up the Stura toward the Tigerfish. Since Grus was on the scene first, they followed his lead. He spaced them out along the river to wait for the Menteshe, too. “How long are we going to wait?” one of their captains called.

  “As long as we have to,” Grus answered, which probably didn’t make the other officer very happy. He had no better answer to give the fellow, though, for Hirundo had given him none.

  They ended up dealing with their first Menteshe before Hirundo could have done anything at all about them. This little band of nomads had had enough looting and raping and killing in Avornis to satisfy them. They were ready to cross back over the Stura into their own country. They expected no trouble. Why should they have expected any? They’d had none coming into Avornis.

  Grus saw them before they spotted the river galleys. He ordered the Tigerfish to pull back, in fact, so they’d be less likely to spot her. To his relief, the other captains did the same. The Menteshe and their horses boarded the rafts the nomads had hidden among riverside rushes and reeds and started paddling across the Stura.

  “Forward!” Grus shouted when those rafts were well out into the stream. Forward the Tigerfish went, and the other galleys, too. How the Menteshe howled! They’d had it all their own way on land. They’d done just as they pleased. No more.

  The Tigerfish’s ram smashed up three rafts in quick succession. Menteshe and horses splashed into the water. Avornan sailors plied the nomads with arrows. The rest of the river galleys treated the other rafts just as rudely. Grus didn’t think any Menteshe in that band made it to the far side of the river.

  But the real herding of the nomads began the next afternoon. Avornan soldiers began pushing them back toward the Stura. By then, too, more than three galleys had arrived to dispute their passage. Now, with plenty of sailors on hand, Grus and his fellow captains handled things differently. The Menteshe couldn’t get past their ships, which cruised close to the shore so their archers could hit the nomads on land. The Menteshe couldn’t gallop out of range, either, for Avornan cavalry kept pushing more of them toward the riverbank.

  Maybe they called on the Banished One to come to their aid. If they did, he failed to hearken to them. Caught between the hammer of the Avornan cavalry and the anvil of the river galleys, they were crushed. Not many got away.

  When the fighting ebbed, Hirundo rode down to the river-bank and waved to Grus. “Good job!” he called.

  “Same to you,” Grus replied. “They didn’t buy anything cheap on this raid.”

  “No, indeed.” Hirundo sketched a salute. “I’d work with you again anytime, Captain.”

  Grus returned that salute. “And I with you, Lieutenant—and I’m afraid the Menteshe will give us the chance, too.” He realized he hadn’t had the chance to find out whether the escaped thrall he’d brought to Anxa had had anything to do with this raid. Well, it’s not that you weren’t busy, he told himself. And even if he did, we hurt the Menteshe more than they hurt us.

  This time.

  Lanius’ first memory was of humiliation. He couldn’t have been more than three years old. He and his mother and father, all splendidly robed, left the palace in a gilded carriage to go to the great cathedral.

  He hadn’t been out of the palace very often. Riding in the carriage was a treat. He squealed with glee as the wheels bounced over cobblestones. “Whee!” he shouted. “Fun!”

  He sat between his mother and father. They smiled at each other above his head. “I wish I thought this was fun,” his father said.

  “Why don’t you, Papa?” Lanius asked in surprise. He couldn’t imagine anything more delightful. Another jounce made him whoop again.

  “My back,” his father said.

  His mother’s smile faded. “It’s the cobbles,” she said quickly. “Shall I tell the driver to slow down?”

  “No, don’t bother,” his father answered. He coughed wetly. “It’s not the road. It’s … my back. I’m not a young man anymore.”

  His father had a white beard. Lanius had never thought anything about it. He didn’t now, either. His father was simply his father, as much a fixture of the world as his favorite blanket or the sunshine that came through his window in the morning.

  The carriage stopped. A soldier opened the door. His mother got down. “Come on, Lanius,” she said. He slithered across the velvet. She caught him, swung him up in the air, and set him down on the bumpy stones of the street.

  “Do it again, Mama!”

  “Maybe later. We have to go to the cathedral first.” His mother peered into the carriage, from which his father hadn’t yet emerged. “Are you all right, dear?”

  “I’m coming.” His father sounded angry. Lanius knew the tone, and shrank from it. But his mother hadn’t done anything to make King Mergus angry. Lanius didn’t think he had, either. What did that leave? Could his father be angry at himself? Grunting a little, the king finally descended.

  “Are you all right?” Lanius’ mother asked again.

  “I’ll do,” his father said testily. “It’s just … my back. And my
gods-cursed cough. Come on. Let’s find out what Arch-Hallow Bucco does this time.”

  Lanius’ mother steered him forward, her hand on his shoulder. He took a couple of steps. Then, all at once, the grandiose immensity of the cathedral ahead filled his sight, and he stopped and stared and stared and stared. Every single line leaped to the sky—pointed windows; tall, narrow arches; buttresses that seemed to fly; and spires, the highest of all crowned by a silver statue of Olor.

  His mother let him gape for a moment or two, then urged him on again. That was when he noticed the man in the red silk robe standing in the gateway, backed by several others in robes of the same cut but of saffron yellow silk. The man in red carried a staff topped by a little silver statue just like the big one on the highest spire. Lanius liked that.

  The man held the staff in front of him, across his body, now. “You may not pass, Your Majesty,” he said—everybody but Lanius and his mother called his father that. “You know you may not pass. We have done this before. Neither you, nor your concubine, nor your bastard.”

  “Have a care, Bucco,” Lanius’ father growled. He was angry now; Lanius was sure of it. “If you insult my wife and my heir, I’ll make you sorry for it.”

  “You have gone against the gods themselves,” the arch-hallow said. “Where Olor contents himself with six, you have taken a seventh. It is sin. It is wickedness. It shall not stand. I have told you this each year when you brought the boy and the woman here.” Behind him, the men in the yellow robes solemnly nodded.

  “One of your priests thought different,” King Mergus said. “He knew what would happen to Avornis without a proper successor to the throne. You’d know it, too, if you’d think a little.” He coughed once more, and turned as red as Arch-Hallow Bucco’s robe.

  “No.” Bucco sounded very certain. “Where you break a rule for the sake of convenience, there the Banished One shows his face.” The priests in saffron silk nodded again, all in unison.

  “They’re funny, Father!” Lanius exclaimed.