The Bastard King

by Harry Turtledove

  Grus wished he hadn’t chosen that moment to remember that bit of lore. Lanius, no doubt, could have told him the names of both kings and whatever else he wanted to know about them—except that he didn’t want to know anything. And he hadn’t answered his own question. He tried now. What if I fall, instead? Well, Avornis can get along better without me than Thervingia can without Dagipert. I’m pretty sure of that.

  Forth from the Thervings’ ranks came a rider with gilded chain mail and a long gray beard. “You pimp!” Dagipert roared at Grus. “Prostitute your daughter with my daughter’s betrothed, will you?” If the King of Thervingia felt his years or anything but raw fury toward Grus, he didn’t show it.

  “I’ll give your daughter to my hangman’s son,” Grus yelled back. Dagipert bellowed with fury. Maybe he’ll have a fit and fall over dead, Grus thought hopefully. That would make his own life easier.

  No such luck. Grus hadn’t really expected it. The two kings traded sword strokes between their armies. Dagipert might have been old, but he knew how to handle a blade. And rage seemed to lend him strength. Before long, Grus knew he would be lucky to beat down his foe—would be lucky, in fact, to live.

  But their private duel lasted only moments. Avornans rushed forward to help Grus rid the world of Dagipert. Thervings ran up to protect their king and assail Grus. In the battle that developed around them, Grus and Dagipert were swept apart. Grus was anything but sorry. He hoped he’d managed to put some fear into King Dagipert, too, but wouldn’t have bet on it.

  Meanwhile, of course, ordinary Thervings could kill him as readily as King Dagipert might have—more readily, in fact, for most of the Thervings were younger and better trained than their king. Grus thrust and parried and slashed. Before long, his sword had blood on it. The blood wasn’t his, though he couldn’t remember wounding any of the enemy.

  “Grus!” his men shouted, and, “Avornis!” and, “Lanius!”

  Hirundo’s horsemen kept nipping in behind Dagipert’s men, trying to cut them off from the woods and surround them. The Thervings detached men from their main line to hold off such flanking moves, which let the Avornans put more pressure on their front. Little by little, that front began to crumble.

  Had it happened all at once, Dagipert’s army would have fallen to pieces, and Grus might have won a famous victory, one that would have let him be talked about in the same breath with storied Kings of Avornis from far-off days. It didn’t. The Thervings kept enough order to withdraw into the forest under good discipline, and he had no great inclination to go after them once they’d drawn back.

  “Congratulations, Your Majesty!” said Colonel Hirundo, coming up to him after the fighting ended. “We beat them!”

  “Yes.” Wearily, Grus nodded. “And do you know what, Colonel? I’ll take that. Considering everything that could have happened, I’ll take it, and gladly.”

  Lanius had always loved the archives. They never argued with him. They never told him no. Not only had he learned a great deal going through them, he’d learned a great deal about how to learn. No one, not even his tutor, ever seemed to have thought about that. The more he did, though, the more important it seemed.

  If he wanted to find out what had happened in ancient days, he went through chronicles, and through the reports generals and other officials had left behind—those were often the raw material from which the chroniclers shaped their stories. If he wanted to find out about money, he started pawing through tax rolls. If he found himself interested in sorcery, a separate part of the archives concerned itself with that. Knowing where and how to start looking was often as important as anything else when he was trying to find out something.

  He breathed in the smells of old parchments and ink and dust as a lover breathed in his lover’s perfume. And, when he decided to find out what the archives had to say about moncats, he went with confidence to the records of old-time Avornan sailing expeditions. In days gone by, Avornis had ruled the northern coast. That was before the Chernagors settled there and began squabbling with Avornis, amongst themselves, and against the Thervings.

  Yaropolk hadn’t told him the name of the island chain Iron and Bronze had come from. That would have made things easier, but he managed well enough without it. And poking through parchments, never quite sure what the next one would show, had a pleasure of its own. Some of those Avornan explorers had sailed a long way. Going through the records they’d left behind, Lanius felt like an explorer himself.

  None of the records used the word moncat; that was just his translation of the name the Chernagors had given the creatures. Of course the old Avornan explorers, if they’d ever come across the animals, would have called them something else.

  When he figured that out, he realized he would have to go back through several parchments he’d already set aside. That left him imperfectly delighted with the world, but he saw no help for it. By then, he was bound and determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. His father had been a stubborn man, too. Had Mergus not been, he never would have taken a seventh wife when Certhia found herself with child.

  Lanius was in no position to defy the world. All he could do was try to learn something he wanted to know. King Grus was making sure nothing more important or glamorous would come his way.

  One of the reports he came across for a second time had nothing to do with ships sailing out across the seas to the north. Just the opposite, in fact—it was an account by some intrepid Avornan who’d pushed far into the south not long after the Menteshe swept the Avornans out of that part of the world.

  He started to put that book aside yet again. But the Avornan explorer, despite his old-fashioned language, wrote in an entertaining style. And so Lanius kept reading.

  “Oh, by the gods!” he said in a low voice. Things down in the south had been a lot more chaotic in the old days than they were now. When Avornis and the Menteshe weren’t fighting these days, they traded across the border. The Menteshe princes, though, made sure Avornans didn’t go too far south of the frontier, while Avornans, fearing each nomad as the Banished One’s eyes and ears, refused to let any Menteshe come very far north.

  Once upon a time, it hadn’t been like that. The fellow whose report Lanius was reading had gotten all the way down to Yozgat, where the Menteshe stowed away the Scepter of Mercy after capturing it from Avornis. That truly amazed Lanius. He hadn’t had the faintest idea any Avornan had set eyes on it from the day the Menteshe took it till now. Yet here was a detailed description of the building where the nomads kept the Scepter. The explorer wrote:

  Were it within the bounds of our own realm, I should without hesitation style it a cathedral. Yet that were false and misleading, the Menteshe now hallowing no other gods save only the false, vile, and wicked spirit cast from the heavens for that he was a sinner, the spirit known as the Banished One. Him do they worship. Him do they reverence, and give no tiniest portion of respect unto King Olor and Queen Quelea, the which thereof are truly deserving.

  He went on for some little while, spewing forth one platitude after another. That tempted Lanius to put aside the old parchment after all. He didn’t, though, and ended up glad he didn’t, for the explorer went on,

  At length, they suffered me to gaze upon this grand and holy relic, now no more than a spoil of war. Yet, like a slave woman once the beautiful and famous wife of some grand noble, it doth retain even in its lowly state a certain haggard loveliness. Indeed, I believe the building wherein it is enshrined was peradventure once a house for the proper gods, though now sadly changed into a hall in which the Banished One receives his undeserved praises of those he hath seduced away from truth and piety.

  That was interesting. Lanius hadn’t believed any shrine to Olor and Quelea had existed so far south. He read on, doing his best to ignore the old-fashioned language. The merchant had been lucky to get out of Yozgat in one piece, for he’d left just before the Banished One himself came to view the Scepter.

  Had I been there then, the Menteshe do assure
me, nothing less than death or thralldom had been my portion. The Menteshe have no love for us Avornans, but the Banished One, being filled with a cold and bitter hate against us, is here even harsher than these his people. In his jealousy, he minds him that we were privileged to wield the Scepter of Mercy, whose touch he to this day may not abide. Thus he stole it, for to keep it from being turned against him.

  Lanius slowly nodded. That all fit in with what other sources told him, but was more definite and emphatic than anything else he’d seen. He wished the merchant had gotten a glimpse of the Banished One. That might have told him things worth knowing. Or, on the other hand, more likely it wouldn’t have. Had the Banished One sensed an Avornan close by, the intrepid explorer would have paid the price for his zeal.

  Carefully, Lanius returned the ancient parchment to its pigeonhole. If ever an Avornan army went down to Yozgat, it might prove useful to the commander. Lanius had never seen a better description of the city’s walls and defenses. On the other hand, it was also more than three hundred years old. No telling what the Menteshe had done since to make sure the Scepter of Mercy stayed exactly where it was.

  He laughed a little, sadly, as he left the archives. No telling, either, when an Avornan army might push south past the Stura River, let alone all the way down to Yozgat. These days, the fight was to keep the Menteshe on their side of the river, and to keep the Banished One from making yet more Avornan farmers into soul-dead thralls.

  The tide may turn again, Lanius thought, and tried very hard to believe it.

  Colonel Hirundo beamed at King Grus. “The tide has turned, Your Majesty!” he exclaimed. “We drive the barbarians.”

  “Yes.” Grus sounded less delighted than his officer. “We’ve given Dagipert something to think about, anyhow.”

  “Something to think about? I should say so,” Hirundo answered. “Three weeks, and we’ve driven his army all the way out of Avornis. There ahead, across that stream, that’s Thervingia. We’re heading into Thervingia.” By the way he said it, he might have been talking about exploring the dark side of the moon. Up till now, the Thervings had had all the better of the fighting between the two kingdoms during Dagipert’s long reign.

  “Send your cavalry across,” Grus told him. “Find a good farm, a prosperous farm, close by the border. Burn it. Run off the livestock. If the farmer puts up a fight, deal with him or capture him and bring him back for the mines. If he flees, let him go. Once you’ve done that, bring your horsemen back.”

  “Bring them back?” Hirundo gaped. “Olor’s beard, why? Uh, Your Majesty?”

  “Because we’ve still got to worry about Corvus and Corax, that’s why,” Grus answered. “Dagipert’s never going to take the city of Avornis, not if he sits outside it for a thousand years.” He’d been more worried than that when Dagipert besieged the royal capital not so very long before, but he wasn’t about to admit it now, not even to himself. He went on, “The rebels just might, though, if we stay away from home too long. Bound to be traitors in the city that Alca’s witchery didn’t find, and who knows how much trouble they can cause if we give ’em the chance?”

  Would Lanius sooner have Corvus for a protector than me? Grus wondered. He’d done everything he could to make his usurpation as painless as possible. He couldn’t very well have gone further than marrying his own daughter to the young king. From all the signs Grus could read, Sosia and Lanius were getting on as well as a couple of newlyweds could. But would Lanius think he could be king in his own right if Corvus overthrew Grus? Grus was convinced he’d be wrong, but that might not have anything to do with what Lanius believed.

  With a sigh, Grus waved Hirundo on. “Go do as I tell you. We’ll let Dagipert know what we might have done. Next time, if we have to, we will do it. This time, he gets off easy, and let him thank the gods for it.”

  Grus hoped Dagipert would take his moderation as a warning and not as a confession of weakness. He knew that was only a hope, though, not a guarantee. Dagipert might think the Avornan civil war was a pot he could stir to his own advantage. He might think that—and he might be right.

  Hirundo saluted. “One burnt-out farmhouse coming up, Your Majesty.”

  He called orders to his horsemen. They rode along the stream, looking for a ford. Before long, the whole band splashed across, then raced on into Thervingia. Grus waited on the Avornan side of the border, worrying. If the Thervings had an army waiting in ambush among those trees over there, as they were fond of doing …

  But no roaring horde of Thervings burst from the woods. No more than a quarter of an hour after Hirundo’s men crossed the border, a column of smoke rose into the air. The soldiers who remained in Avornis with King Grus pointed to it and nudged one another. The vengeance the horsemen were taking might be small and symbolic, but vengeance it was.

  Then Hirundo led his column back from the west. This time, they made for the ford without hesitation. Water dripping from his mount’s belly and from his own boots, Hirundo rode up to Grus. “It’s taken care of, Your Majesty,” he said. “The farmer and his kin tried putting up a fight from inside the house. Brave—but stupid. One of their arrows hurt a horse. I hope it makes ’em feel better in the next world, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “All right,” Grus said. “We’ve done what we came to do.” We’ve done enough of what we came to do, anyhow. “Now we go back to the city of Avornis and take care of something else.” We’ll take care of a piece of something else, anyway. I hope we’ll be able to take care of a piece of it. He wished he could worry about one trouble at a time, instead of having them land on him in clumps.

  At Hirundo’s orders, the army turned about. Grus watched the men, liking the way they kept looking back toward the border. They weren’t worrying about the Thervings falling on them. They were wishing they could have done more in the enemy’s land. That was all to the good.

  Hirundo seemed to be thinking along with him. “These men have the Thervings’ measure,” he said.

  Grus nodded. “I think you’re right. We’ve spent a while running away from them—running away or getting trapped. The sooner Dagipert decides he can’t get away with bullying us, the better off we’ll be.”

  “Well, we made a fair start here,” Hirundo said.

  “It also helps that we had an officer here who did such a good job against the enemy. Congratulations, General Hirundo.”

  Hirundo’s eyes glowed. “Thank you very much, Your Majesty! This is a lot better than chasing the Menteshe all over the landscape.”

  Grus looked south. “One of these days, maybe, we’ll see if we can do a proper job of chasing the Menteshe.” He sighed. “It won’t be anytime soon, though, I’m afraid. We have a few other things to worry about first.” A laugh without mirth. “Oh, yes, just a few.”

  But, as the long column of horsemen and foot soldiers and wagons made its way back toward the city of Avornis, Grus kept looking southward. He knew where the kingdom’s greatest enemy dwelt. He would have been a fool if he didn’t. He laughed that unhappy laugh again. I may be a fool. I’ve been a fool before—the gods know that’s true. But there are fools, and then there are fools. I’m not the kind of fool who forgets about the Banished One. I hope I’m not. I’d better not be.

  Part of King Lanius was disappointed to have King Grus come back in what looked very much like triumph. Part of Lanius, in fact, was disappointed to see Grus come back to the capital at all. Had the Thervings overwhelmed the usurper, Lanius would have been King of Avornis in fact as well as in name.

  Unfortunately, though, becoming king in fact as well as in name wouldn’t have magically turned him into a general. And, if Dagipert’s men had slaughtered Grus, they would have slaughtered his army, too—which would have left exactly nothing between them and another siege of the city of Avornis. They’d come too close to taking the capital the last time. This time, they might actually bring it off. And then where would you be? Lanius asked himself. He liked none of the answers he came up with.


  Grus, meanwhile, had other things on his mind. “Well, Corvus has proved he’s just as bad a general when he’s fighting against Avornis as he was when he claimed he was fighting for the kingdom,” he said.

  “I don’t understand,” Lanius told him. “How can you say that? You haven’t fought Corvus at all, not yet.”

  “That’s exactly how I can say it—because I haven’t fought Corvus yet, I mean.” Grus grinned at Lanius.

  Lanius didn’t grin back. He knew he was being teased, and he’d always been sensitive of his dignity. “Stop joking and tell me what you mean,” he said severely.

  To his annoyance, Grus’ grin only got wider. His unwelcome colleague on the throne bowed low and said, “Yes, Your Majesty,” as though Lanius held it all by himself—the way I’m supposed to, Lanius thought. Grus went on, “If Corvus were any kind of a soldier, he would have come up here and tried to take the city of Avornis away from me while I was busy with the Thervings. Since he didn’t, I get to move against him instead of the other way around—and I intend to.”

  “Oh.” Lanius’ irritation evaporated. He nodded to King Grus. “Yes, you’re right. I understand now. Thank you.”

  “‘Thank you’?” Grus echoed. “For what?”

  “For showing me something I hadn’t seen myself, of course,” Lanius answered. “It hadn’t occurred to me that you could judge a general by whether he fought at all as well as by how well he fought.”

  “Well, you can. And you’re welcome, for whatever it’s worth to you.” Grus’ expression remained quizzical. “You’re a funny one, aren’t you?”

  “So I’m told, now and again. I don’t see the joke myself—but then, that may be what makes me funny to other people.” Lanius shrugged.

  “You are a funny one,” Grus said positively. “If you’re willing to give it, I’m going to want your help against Corvus and Corax.”