The Bastard King

by Harry Turtledove

  He did sound sorry. That didn’t keep King Scolopax’s wrath from rising, though the arch-hallow had spoken nothing but truth. Scolopax’s wife was a sour harridan named Gavia. But she could have been the sweetest woman in the world, and it wouldn’t have mattered much. Scolopax had married her because his father made him marry her. He’d always spent more time with his favorites among the guardsmen than with Gavia or any other woman. His current favorites were two stalwart mercenaries from the Therving country, Waccho and Aistulf.

  “You never mind me,” Scolopax growled. “You mind the gods.” That wasn’t quite what he’d meant to say. At least, it wasn’t quite how he’d meant to say it. But he was the king. He didn’t have to take anything back. He didn’t have to, and he didn’t.

  Megadyptes looked at him with sorrowful eyes. “I do mind the gods, as best I can,” he said. “And I mind the kingdom, as best I can. I did what I did for Avornis’ sake.”

  “Avornis is mine!” Scolopax shouted.

  “For now, Your Majesty,” Arch-Hallow Megadyptes said calmly. “For now.”

  “Mine!” Scolopax yelled again, even louder than before—loud enough to bring those echoes from the ceiling. But even that wasn’t enough for him. He sprang down from the throne, seized Megadyptes’ long white beard with both hands, and yanked with all his strength. The Arch-Hallow of Avornis let out a piteous wail of pain. Scolopax yanked again. “You are deposed!” he cried. “Get out, you wretch, before I give you worse!”

  Tufts of Megadyptes’ beard, like bits of wool, fluttered out from between the king’s fingers and down to the floor. The arch-hallow’s cheeks and chin began to bleed. “I will pray for you, Your Majesty,” he said.

  Courtiers and servants looked this way and that—every way but at King Scolopax. The king was too furious to notice, or to care. “Get out!” he screamed. Megadyptes bowed once more, and departed. An enormous silence settled over the throne room once he had gone.

  Later that day, Aistulf told Scolopax, “Don’t worry about it, Your Majesty. You did the right thing. Whatever you want to do, it is the right thing.” The guardsman was tall and blond and muscular and handsome, with a bristling mustache and a chin shaved naked. Scolopax found that most exciting.

  “Of course I did,” the king answered. “How could I do anything else?”

  And when Scolopax slept that night, he saw in his dreams a supremely handsome face studying him. The face was splendid enough to make even Aistulf (even Waccho, who was handsomer still) seem insipid—but cold, cold. Scolopax stirred and muttered. Something in those eyes … Then the watcher murmured, “Well done,” and smiled. That should have made the king feel better. Somehow, it only made things worse.

  Lanius recited the alphabet perfectly. His tutor beamed. “That’s very fine,” the man said. “Now, can you write it for me, too?”

  “Of course I can.” Lanius hardly bothered hiding his scorn.

  “Can you?” The tutor was brand new in the palace. He’d spent the last several years trying to educate the sons of the nobility, most of whom were as resistant to learning as a cesspit cleaner’s children were to disease. To find a pupil not only willing but eager felt like something close to a miracle. He pulled pen and ink and parchment from his wallet. “Show me.”

  “I will.” And Lanius did. As soon as he took hold of the pen, the tutor knew he told the truth. His letters staggered and limped as much as any five-year-old’s, but they were all properly shaped. “There!”

  “That’s … very good indeed,” the tutor said.

  No one had praised Lanius since his father died and his mother went away. It went straight to his head, as wine would have in a grown man. “I can do more than that,” he said. “I can write words, too.”

  “Oh, you can, can you?” Again, the tutor had trouble believing him. He was a solemn child, small for his age, with eyes as big in his face as a kitten’s. When he nodded, he showed disconcerting wisdom. The tutor said, “Well, why don’t you let me see that, too?”

  I want my mother to come back to the palace. I miss her, Lanius wrote. Again, the letters were of a child. The thought behind them was simple, but how many children his age could have put it forth so accurately? Not many, and the tutor knew it full well.

  “You really can write!” he exclaimed. “That’s wonderful!”

  Again, Lanius blossomed with the praise. But then he looked at the tutor once more with those eyes wise beyond his years. “If I already know these things,” he asked, “why do I need you?”

  The tutor coughed. However arrogant the question, he thought he’d better give it a serious answer. “Well, for one thing, you know a lot—an amazing lot—but I still know more.”

  Lanius wasn’t at all sure he believed that. He asked, “What else?”

  Now the tutor laughed. “For another, Your Highness, if I go away, who will tell you how clever you are?”

  “You’re right,” Lanius said at once. “You must stay.” The tutor had praised him. If he could get praise for being clever, he would show the man he was very clever indeed. “Teach me!”

  “I … will.” No one had ever spoken to the tutor with such urgency. “What would you like to learn?”

  “Anything. Everything! Teach me. I’ll learn it. Where do we start?”

  Lanius seemed desperate, like a drowning man grabbing for a spar. The tutor could no more help responding to such eagerness to learn than he could have helped responding to a pretty girl’s different eagerness in bed. “Your Highness,” he said, “I’ll do everything I can for you.”

  “Just teach me,” Lanius told him.

  Grus was glad to get out of the city of Avornis. He wished he could have gotten his family out of the capital, too. He didn’t like the way people were choosing between Arch-Hallow Bucco and former arch-hallow Megadyptes. That also meant they were choosing sides about whether Lanius was a bastard or King Mergus’ legitimate son—and so the likely heir and possible rival to King Scolopax. No matter how it ended, it would be messy.

  Thanks to his victories over the Menteshe, Grus had been promoted to commodore—a captain commanding a whole flotilla. Nicator, his lieutenant aboard the Tigerfish in days gone by, now commanded Grus’ flagship. “That last one will take care of itself,” Nicator told him when he grumbled as the flotilla stopped in the town of Veteres one evening.

  “How?” Grus asked. “Either you’re for one of ’em or the other. You can’t very well be for both, and nobody’s about to change sides.”

  “I know, I know,” Nicator said patiently. “But Megadyptes is such a holy old geezer, he’s got to fall over dead one day soon. Then everybody will be for Bucco, on account of what choice will they have?”

  “The people who follow Megadyptes will make a party, that’s what. They’ll say Scolopax never should have thrown him out, the way people were saying Mergus never should have thrown Bucco out. They’ll riot—you wait and see if they don’t.”

  “And Scolopax’ll turn soldiers loose on ’em, and that’ll be the end of that.” Nicator saw the world in very simple terms.

  “Well … maybe.” Grus didn’t think things were so simple, but he didn’t feel like arguing with his friend, either. He set a silver groat on the tavern table in front of him and rose to his feet. “Come on. Let’s get back to the ships.”

  “Right,” Nicator said. “I’m with you.”

  Veteres lay on the upper reaches of the Tuola River, heading up toward the foothills of the Bantian Mountains. River galleys couldn’t go much farther west. Some of the hill country beyond the Tuola belonged to Avornis. As in the south, the kingdom had once held more land. Over the past few years, though, King Dagipert and the Thervings ruled what had been western provinces of Avornis.

  A couple of Thervings led a string of hill ponies through the streets of Veteres toward the market square. They were big, broad-shouldered men, bigger than most Avornans. They wore their fair hair down to their shoulders, but shaved their chins. Grus thought that looked sil
ly. Foreigners had all kinds of odd notions. There was nothing silly about the sword on one Therving’s hip, though, or about the battle-ax the other one carried. Grus kept his mouth shut. Avornis and Thervingia weren’t at war—now.

  Nicator muttered, “Miserable bastards.” But he made sure the Thervings didn’t hear him.

  Down by the riverside, three or four more Thervings strode along the bank from one pier to the next. Their eyes were on Grus’ flotilla, so much so that they didn’t even notice Nicator and him coming up behind them. Pleasantly, Grus asked, “Help you with something?”

  The big men jumped. One of them spoke in slow, accented Avornan. “We are just—how you say?—taking the air. Yes.” He nodded. “Taking the air.”

  “That’s nice,” Commodore Grus said, still pleasantly. “Why don’t you take it somewhere else?”

  He didn’t put his hand anywhere near his own sword. The Thervings could have given him and Nicator a hard time before more Avornans came to help. They didn’t. They went and took the air somewhere else. “Spies,” Nicator said.

  “What else would you expect?” Grus said blandly.

  Nicator pointed to a warehouse roof pole that stuck out from the building for some little distance. “We ought to hang them right there,” he said.

  “Why?” Grus asked.

  Nicator stared at him. “Olor’s throne, man!” he said. “We hang them because they’re spies.”

  “But they’re very bad spies,” Grus said. “If we do hang them, King Dagipert will only send more, and the new ones may know what they’re doing.”

  After chewing on that for close to a minute, Nicator finally decided to laugh. He said, “You’re a funny fellow, Skipper.”

  Now it was Grus’ turn to be puzzled. “But I wasn’t joking,” he said.

  With another man, or another pair of men, that might have started an argument, even a fight. Grus and Nicator ended up laughing about it. They got along even when they disagreed.

  No bridges spanned the Tuola. A long time ago, when Avornis was stronger, there had been some. After the Thervings came, the Avornans wrecked them—why make invasion easier? The Thervings found it easy enough even without bridges. It was still the custom, though, for Therving embassies to come down to the Tuola where the ruined end of a bridge still projected six or eight feet into the water. In the old days, embassies had crossed by that bridge. The custom had outlived the span.

  A flag of truce flew above the embassy. Grus studied the Thervings from the deck of his river galley—an ambassador with a gold chain of office around his neck, a wizard, half a dozen guards. An Avornan embassy would have included a secretary, too, but not many Thervings knew how to write.

  “Who are you? What do you want? Why do you come into Avornis?” Grus called. As the highest-ranking Avornan present, he asked the formal questions.

  “I am Zangrulf,” the ambassador answered in good Avornan. “I come from King Dagipert, the mighty, the terrible, to King Scolopax to talk about renewing the tribute Avornis pays to Thervingia.”

  Grus sighed. Most of him wished his kingdom didn’t pay tribute to the Thervings, even if it was cheaper than fighting. But, from what he’d heard and seen of Scolopax, he didn’t like the idea of his going to war against a sly old fox like Dagipert. “I will send a boat,” he said. “Then I will take you to Veteres, and you can go to the city of Avornis on the royal highway.”

  Zangrulf and the wizard put their heads together. The ambassador waved out to the river galley. “I agree. Make it so.”

  He had no business giving Grus orders, but Grus kept quiet. Thervings always acted as though they owned the world. The boat went to the riverbank. It wasn’t a big boat, and needed two trips to bring the whole embassy back to the galley. Zangrulf’s wizard came in the second trip.

  Except for two rings in the shape of snakes—one silver, one gold—he wore on his little fingers, he looked like any other Therving: big, fair, long-haired, smooth-chinned. But his eyes—clever eyes—narrowed when he looked at Grus. Then he looked a little longer, and those clever eyes went wide. He spoke in Thervingian to Zangrulf.

  The ambassador looked at Grus, too. He said, “Aldo says you are a great man.”

  “Tell him thank you,” Grus answered, smiling. “Except for my wife, he’s the only one who seems to think so.”

  He also evidently followed Avornan, though he chose not to use it with Zangrulf. King Dagipert’s envoy spoke for him once more. “He also says you will be an even greater man, if you live.”

  “Does he?” Grus wondered exactly what that was supposed to mean. “Well, I’m likelier to be a greater man if I live than if I don’t.”

  Zangrulf chuckled. Aldo didn’t. Again, he spoke in Thervingian. Again, the ambassador translated. “He says yes, that is true. But he also says there are men, and more than men, who will not want you to live. He says, beware.”

  Grus started to answer that with another joke. The words stuck in his throat. It had been years since the Banished One appeared in his dreams, but he’d never forgotten—however much he wished he could.

  Prince Lanius bowed to his tutor as a peasant might have bowed to the King of Avornis. “Please!” the prince said. “I’ll work twice as hard tomorrow if you let me see the Thervings today!”

  He’d had to learn flattery. Some of his lessons said that people flattered princes, not the other way round. Maybe that was true for other princes. It wasn’t true for Lanius.

  His tutor didn’t answer right away. The man plucked at his beard, thinking things over. At last, he said, “Let me ask His Majesty’s chamberlains. It’s not really up to me. It’s up to the king.”

  Hope died in Lanius. “He won’t let me. He never lets me do anything I want. He won’t even let me see my mama.” He’d just lost his first tooth. His tongue kept exploring the hole where it had been. Once there, now gone. Having Queen Certhia banished from the palace left the same sort of hole in his life. He would grow a new tooth. How could he grow a new mother?

  “Let me ask,” the tutor said again. “You are King Scolopax’s heir, after all.” That meant little to Lanius. From everything he’d seen, it also meant little to Scolopax. But when the tutor came back, he was smiling. “It’s all arranged. You can do it. You have to put on your fancy robe and your coronet, but you can do it.”

  “Oh, thank you!” Lanius cried. The robe, heavy with gold thread, made his skinny shoulders sag and hurt from its weight. The coronet was too small for him, and most uncomfortable. He didn’t care. Getting something he really wanted didn’t happen very often. He intended to enjoy it as much as he could.

  He had a place not far from the throne, across the aisle from Arch-Hallow Bucco. Even that couldn’t ruin his day, although the arch-hallow kept glaring at him as though he had no right to exist.

  King Scolopax sat impassive on the sparkling Diamond Throne. His robes, of cloth-of-gold, put Lanius’ to shame. His golden crown, set with rubies and sapphires and emeralds, was far heavier than Lanius’ coronet. His expression might have been regal calm. On the other hand, he might have been slightly sozzled.

  But then Lanius forgot all about his uncle, the king. Here came the Thervings. Their ambassador wore a fur jacket, leather trousers, and boots that clomped on the marble throne-room floor. Avornan soldiers in gilded chain-mail shirts surrounded him and his companions. Lanius wished they would go away. They made it hard for him to see the Thervings.

  A herald bawled out the ambassador’s name—Zangrulf. He bowed very low to King Scolopax. The other Thervings, the ones who served the ambassador, bowed lower still. Lanius wanted to imitate them. Only the thought that he would probably get a spanking if he did made him hold still.

  “Avornis has paid tribute to Thervingia for many years,” the ambassador said in fluent if accented Avornan. “The last treaty for the tribute is going to expire. King Dagipert expects you to renew it at the same rate.”

  Behind Lanius, his tutor, dressed in a robe so fine it was surely b
orrowed, let out a soft hiss of anger. “He bargains over kingdoms the way an old woman in the vegetable market bargains over beets.”

  Lanius hardly heard him. He was watching his uncle, up there on the Diamond Throne. Scolopax looked every inch a king. He sat hardly moving, staring down at the Therving ambassador like a god looking down on creatures some other, clumsier, deity had made. When Zangrulf finished, Scolopax deigned to speak one word: “No.”

  At that one word, whispers almost too soft to hear raced through the throne room. Lanius felt the surprise and excitement, though he didn’t know what they meant. Zangrulf spelled that out for him like his tutor spelling out a new, hard word. “If you refuse, Your Majesty, King Dagipert will be within his rights to go to war against you, to go to war against Avornis.”

  Those whispers raced through the throne room again. This time, they had a little more weight to them. This time, too, that one word was loud even in the quiet. War.

  “No,” King Scolopax repeated. “That’s what I said, and that’s what I meant. You can tell it to your precious king, or to anyone else you please.”

  “Think twice, Your Majesty,” Zangrulf said. “Think three times. King Dagipert is fierce, and dangerous to anger. The armies of Thervingia are brave, and ready for battle. King Mergus did not refuse us. He—”

  Lanius could have told the Therving that mentioning his father was not the way to get his uncle to go in a direction he wanted. He could have told that to Zangrulf, but he never got the chance. King Scolopax did it for him. When Scolopax said “No!” this time, he shouted the word out at the top of his lungs. Then he pointed to the door. “Get out!” he yelled. “Get out, and be happy you still keep your head on your shoulders. Get out!”

  As though the embassy had gone just the way he’d hoped, Zangrulf bowed again. So did his retainers. They turned and trooped out of the throne room. The Avornan guards surrounded them, as they had before. Lanius wanted to clap his hands. All through his life, he would love a parade.