The Bastard King

by Harry Turtledove

  “Yes.” Lanius tried a different tack. “Don’t you think she’d want to take the chance?”

  Marshal Lepturus surprised him again, this time by smiling. “Yes, I think she would. I’d bet money on it, matter of fact. She’s got nerve—and to spare, your mother does.” He sounded very fond—and very knowing. Lanius suddenly wondered if the two of them had been lovers after King Mergus died. He’d never wondered anything like that about his mother before. If they had been lovers, they’d kept quiet about it; there’d never been the faintest whisper of scandal, and people had always been ready to do more than whisper—they’d been ready to shout.

  Before Lanius could wonder how to ask or even whether to ask, Lepturus went on, “But that’s why you’ve got to have the sense to leave her where she is. If you bring her out of the Maze—if you bring her back to the city of Avornis—odds are you’ll just get her killed. Is that what you want?”

  “Of course not. Don’t you think I could win? Don’t you think we could win?”

  “You watched Grus against Corvus and Corax. What do you think?”

  Lanius winced. While he’d watched Grus against the rebels, he’d been convinced he would lose if he tried to rise up against his father-in-law. When Grus had let him go back to the city of Avornis while besieging Corvus, he hadn’t tried to hold the capital against Sosia’s father. For one thing, Nicator and a good-sized host of marines had come back to the city of Avornis with him. But, for another, he simply hadn’t dared. He’d been too sure he would lose.

  Why did he think differently now? Only one answer occurred to him—he would have his mother at his side. Would having Queen Certhia with him make enough difference to let him beat Grus? When he looked at that with his heart, he felt it would. When he looked at it with his head, he knew it wouldn’t.

  And when he looked at Lepturus … The guards commander hadn’t quite answered his question before. He asked it again. “You wouldn’t help, would you?”

  Regretfully, Lepturus shook his head. “I want you to stay alive, and I want Certhia to stay alive, and I’ve got this low, sneaking yen to stay alive a while longer myself.”

  “Curse you, Lepturus,” King Lanius said wearily. Lepturus bowed his head, as though Lanius had praised him. Maybe, in the end, Lanius had, though he would never have admitted that even to himself. He made a fist and slammed it down on his thigh, again and again. “All right. All right. I’ll leave it alone.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. You won’t be sorry.”

  “No? I’m sorry already.” Lanius rose from the marble bench and hurried away. No one, not even a man who’d known him his whole life long, should have to see a king cry.

  “We beat the Thervings last year,” Grus told his men. “We beat them when we had a civil war simmering, too. This year, our back is safe. When we meet them again, let’s beat them again.”

  The soldiers raised a cheer. Grus nodded approval. They weren’t where he wanted them to be as far as fighting strength went, but they didn’t quake in their boots at the prospect of facing King Dagipert’s men, either. That would do.

  General Hirundo said, “We’re gaining, Your Majesty.”

  “Just what I was thinking, as a matter of fact,” Grus answered. “If we can keep from getting overrun and massacred, we’ll have ourselves a pretty fair army in a couple of years.”

  “Er … yes.” Hirundo gave him a curious look. “That’s a cheery thought you had there.” He pretended to shiver to show just how cheery he thought it.

  “We’re going out against the Thervings. We’re not staying behind the walls of the city of Avornis,” Grus said. “Year before last, we’d have waited for him to quit tearing up the countryside and go away, and we’d have hoped he didn’t do too much harm while he was tearing things up. So, yes, it is a cheery thought if you look at it the right way.”

  “Well, I’d rather look at it like that than think of the Thervings overrunning us, I will say,” Hirundo replied. “Thinking about that for too long puts a crimp in your day.”

  “If we think about it, we can think about ways to keep it from happening,” Grus said. “That’s what I want to do. If we don’t think about it … If we don’t think about it, then we might as well bring Corvus out of the Maze and put him in charge of the army again.”

  “No, thanks, Your Majesty,” Hirundo said. “We tried that once, and it didn’t work out very well.” He waved. “We can still see just how well it worked.”

  “I know,” Grus said. Here, not far from the Tuola River, the Thervings had done a lot of burning and looting. They hadn’t come so far east this year, but the land remained empty, almost barren. They’d killed a lot of the farmers who’d worked it, and carried others back to Thervingia with them. One of these days, when things were safer, Grus knew he would have to try to resettle this land. But not yet. First, he’d have to work to make things safer. And he had a lot of work ahead of him.

  Riders came galloping back from the direction of the river. “Thervings!” they shouted. “A whole great swarm of Thervings!”

  Grus looked at Hirundo. “Well, General,” the king said, “now we have to make sure we don’t get overrun and massacred, don’t we?”

  “That would be nice,” Hirundo agreed.

  Horns screamed out commands to shift from marching column into line of battle. The men obeyed the trumpets—and their officers’ bellowed orders—without fuss and without worry, or at least with no outward show of it. Grus watched them closely. He liked what he saw. Turning to Hirundo, he said, “They’re ready enough.”

  “Yes, I think so, too,” the general replied. “Pretty soon, we’ll find out how ready the Thervings are.”

  They didn’t have to wait long. The Thervings came forward already in line of battle. The sun glinted from spearheads and sword blades and helmets and chain-mail shirts. The Thervings howled like wolves and roared like tigers. They actively liked to fight. That seemed very strange to Grus. He didn’t know a single Avornan to whom it didn’t seem strange. Liking to fight was a sure hallmark of barbarians—the Menteshe did, too.

  Like it or not, the Avornans sometimes had to fight. This was one of those times: Fight or run away. They’d done too much running, and suffered too much for it. Not liking to fight didn’t mean they couldn’t. Grus hoped it didn’t, anyhow. If it did, he was in a lot of trouble.

  “Forward!” he shouted, and pointed to the trumpeters. Their horns blared out the same message.

  And the Avornan soldiers, horse and foot, went forward. They shouted Grus’ name, and Lanius’, and Hirundo’s, and that of Avornis itself. The first time Grus heard men shouting his name, the hair had stood up on the back of his neck with awe and pride. Now that he’d been at the game for a while, he gauged other things, such as how ready to fight they sounded. Again, he found nothing about which to complain.

  King Dagipert’s men always sounded ready. They sounded so very ready, no sane soldier should have wanted to face them. Grus, sword in hand, wondered what he was doing here. Then he shrugged. If he fell, Ortalis would doubtless try to rule. If Ortalis could, he would. If he couldn’t, Lanius would. Who would get rid of whom? Either way, my line goes on, the king thought.

  He wanted to go on himself. But here he was on horseback, brandishing that sword, galloping toward men who wanted nothing more than to kill him—unless, of course, it was to torture him and then kill him. A sensible man would have galloped in the other direction. Lanius was sensible. Grus, or some large part of him, wished he were.

  A big, burly, bearded, braided Therving stood in front of him, holding his ax in both hands. The Therving swung up the ax at the same time as Grus drew back his sword. They both tried to kill each other at the same time, too. The Therving’s ax stroke missed—missed by what couldn’t have been the thickness of a hair. Grus’ sword bit. The Therving howled.

  And then Grus was past, and hacking and slashing at more of Dagipert’s soldiers. By himself, he was n
o great warrior, as he knew too well. But he wasn’t by himself. He headed hundreds of horsemen, most of them shouting his name. At their head, he was something larger, grander, and altogether more menacing than an ordinary soldier. He and his riders drove deep into the Thervings’ ranks, as though nothing in the world—certainly not the men from the Bantian Mountains—could stop them.

  This time, that turned out to be true. For a while, the Thervings fought with all their usual ferocity. But they weren’t used to meeting Avornans who fought at least as savagely as they did. When Grus and his men kept going forward in spite of all the Thervings could do to stop them, panic seeped through the enemy’s ranks.

  All at once, Grus wasn’t striking at men who were trying to cut him down. All at once, there were only Therving backs before him, as Dagipert’s host broke and fled.

  Half an hour later, his horse stood panting at the eastern bank of the Tuola. Therving corpses lay scattered from the battlefield all the way to the riverbank. If Dagipert’s men hadn’t had boats in the river, none of them would have gotten away. Grus paused for a long, deep breath. “They won’t cross back this year, by the gods,” he said. The men with him cheered.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Lanius had seen Prince Ortalis in a lot of different moods—sullen, sulky, angry, nasty, vicious, cruel. He couldn’t ever remember seeing Ortalis with a simple smile of pleasure on his handsome face. “Great sport!” Lanius’ brother-in-law exclaimed. “By King Olor’s strong right hand, there’s no better sport in all the world.”

  “What’s that, Your Highness?” Normally, Lanius said as little as he could to Ortalis. Seeing Grus’ son without a sneer on his face, though, made him break his own rule.

  “Why, the boar I killed this morning,” Ortalis answered. “Would you care to come hunting with me one of these days, Your Majesty?”

  He didn’t even sound as though he wanted Lanius to be his quarry. He seemed for all the world a man who’d found something he enjoyed and wanted someone he knew to enjoy it, too. To Lanius, though, it was no wonder boar and bore sounded alike. He shook his head. “No, thanks,” he told Ortalis. But then he had the wit to add, “Maybe you’ll tell me about the hunt you’re just back from.”

  Ortalis did, in alarming detail. Lanius heard all about flushing the boar from the brush in which it hid, about chasing it on horseback through the woods, about the way its tushes had ripped the guts out of one hunting dog and scored a great wound in another’s flank, how Ortalis’ spear had gone in just behind the shoulder, how the boar had struggled and bled and finally died.

  “Then the beaters and I butchered it,” Ortalis finished. He laughed and held up his hands. “I’ve still got blood under my nails. And how does roast boar sound for supper tonight?” He smacked his lips to show what he thought.

  Roast boar sounded good to Lanius, too, and he said so. Prince Ortalis went off, whistling a cheery tune.

  He still likes the blood, Lanius thought. It’s in his soul, not just under his fingernails. But if he’s killing beasts, maybe that will keep him happy—and keep him from wanting to do anything worse. By the gods, maybe it will.

  When he went to tell Sosia what he’d seen and what he thought of it, she nodded. “Mother and I have been trying to talk Ortalis into going hunting for a while now—Father, too, before he went out on campaign. We had to do it a little at a time, for fear of making him think we were trying to push him into it.”

  “That’s … sneaky,” Lanius said. “It’s a good idea, though, I think. Who came up with it?”

  “Father did,” Sosia answered. “Mother thought it was a good notion, too, but Father was the one who had it.”

  “I might have known,” Lanius muttered. Grus had a knack for figuring out how to get the better of people—if not one way, then another. Lanius sighed. He’s certainly gotten the better of me.

  He glanced over to Sosia. “How do you feel?” he asked. Her belly bulged enormously. The baby would come before long.

  “I just want it to be done,” she said, and then, sharply, “Stop that!” She looked up at Lanius. “He’s kicking me again.”

  “I figured that out,” he answered. Feeling the baby move—now, sometimes, seeing the baby move—inside his wife was one of the strangest things he’d ever known. It made everything seem inescapably real.

  “Careful in there, Crex,” Sosia said. “That hurt.” She looked up at Lanius with a rueful smile on his face. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  As always, she called the baby by the name they would give it if it turned out to be a boy. They hadn’t even talked about what they might call it if it was a girl. Lanius’ answering smile was probably rueful, too, though he did his best to make it seem cheerful. He didn’t have mixed feelings about getting kicked, of course. But he did have mixed feelings, and feelings worse than mixed, about naming their son—if he was a son—after Grus’ father. He’d wanted to call a baby boy Mergus, for his own father. He’d wanted to, but Sosia had gotten her way.

  Oh, I make a mighty king, don’t I? Lanius thought. I’m so mighty, I can’t even give my firstborn son the name I want.

  Sosia said, “When we have another boy, we’ll name him Mergus.”

  Lanius started. “How did you know what I was thinking?”

  “Whenever I call him Crex, you look … I don’t know … not quite the way you should. Not quite happy. I want you to be happy, you know.”

  If she didn’t, no one in all the world did. Lanius believed she did. But she didn’t care enough to let him call a boy Mergus. He muttered to himself. That wasn’t quite right. She did care. But she had to weigh other things against what he wanted.

  Family, Lanius thought. Hers included not just him but also Grus and Estrilda and Ortalis and, the king supposed, now Arch-Hallow Anser, too. Lanius had seen how much family counted among Grus and his kin. The only exception to the rule he’d found was Ortalis—and he’d never thought of Ortalis as a good example for anyone.

  With a sigh, Lanius nodded. “All right.” It wasn’t, but he had no choice. When he spoke again, he spoke as firmly as though he were a king issuing a decree other people really had to obey. “Our second son will be named Mergus.”

  “Come on!” Grus called to his men. “Keep after them. If we beat them on our side of the Tuola, we drive them out of Avornis altogether. Let’s push them back into Thervingia where they belong.”

  “Campaigning right by the Tuola on our side almost feels like campaigning in Thervingia,” Hirundo remarked.

  “I know it does,” Grus said. “It shouldn’t, though. This is just as much Avornan soil as the ground the royal palace sits on. It’s closer to the border, so the barbarians keep trying to take it away from us. But it’s ours.”

  “I’m not arguing, Your Majesty.” Hirundo grinned. “You’d probably take my head if I tried it.”

  “I ought to take your head for your silly talk,” Grus replied—with a laugh to make sure Hirundo and everyone else listening knew he was joking.

  His army certainly seemed to feel it wasn’t in Avornan territory, or maybe just that it wasn’t in safe territory, when it encamped that night. Even without orders from General Hirundo, the soldiers set out swarms of sentries and chopped down trees and dragged them around the camp to make a palisade that would, at least, slow down any Therving rush out of the darkness.

  A courier from the capital rode into camp not long after sunset. “What have you got for me there?” Grus asked when soldiers brought the fellow before him.

  “A letter from your daughter, Queen Sosia,” the man answered.

  “Ah? By the gods, has she had her baby?” Grus demanded. “Tell me at once! At once, I say! Is she well? Is the baby a boy?”

  But the courier was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty, but no,” he said. “She’s not given birth yet. Thinking on what the lady your daughter looks like and remembering my wife, I’d say it’ll come any day now, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

 
“All right.” Grus clamped down on his disappointment. “What is she writing about, then?”

  “I’m sorry again, sir, but I don’t know,” the courier replied. “She gave me the letter sealed, just as you see it, and she didn’t tell me why she’d written to you.”

  “Well, in that case I’ll have to find out, won’t I?” Grus turned to the soldiers who’d escorted the courier to his pavilion. “He’s come a long way and ridden hard. Give him food and wine and a place by a fire to sleep tonight.”

  As they led the man from the capital away, Grus ducked into his tent. He sat down in a folding chair by a lamp on a light folding table. Breaking the green wax seal on the letter, he unrolled the parchment and began to read.

  Hello, Father, Sosia wrote. King Olor keep you and the army safe. I wish I would have this baby. I think I have been carrying it for the last five years. It feels that way, anyhow. Grus smiled. His daughter with a pen in her hand sounded the same as she did when she was talking. Sosia didn’t put up with much nonsense—her own or anyone else’s. She went on, I really did not write to complain. I wrote because I thought you might be interested to hear that Ortalis has gone out hunting again, and come back happy after the kill. I also thought you might be interested to hear that he and Arch-Hallow Anser, our half brother, went hunting together. They both seemed to have a good time.

  Grus stroked his beard. That was interesting. He’d known his bastard boy was a passionate hunter. When he’d started trying to get Ortalis to kill wild things instead of tormenting pets and people, he hadn’t connected the one and the other. Evidently his sons had made the connection without any help from him.

  Knowing Ortalis for what he was, he wondered if the connection was safe for Anser. After a moment, he decided it was. Ortalis didn’t want to be Arch-Hallow of Avornis, and he had to know a bastard couldn’t supplant him. That meant Anser was probably in no danger of suffering a hunting accident.