The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  “He sure did,” Hirundo said enthusiastically. “Even I didn’t know where we were until just before we got here.” He looked around, then scratched his head. “I don’t know where he’s gotten to now, though.” His shrug might have been apology.

  Grus also eyed the field. His men, swords drawn, were moving over it. They plundered the dead Menteshe and cut the throats of the wounded nomads they found. Had the fight gone against them, the invaders would have done, the same, though they would have reserved some Avornans for torment before death’s mercy came. Here a trooper held up a fine sword with a glittering edge, there another displayed a purse nicely heavy with coins, in another place a man threw on a fur-edged cape not badly bloodstained.

  Several Avornans picked up recurved Menteshe bows. One fitted an arrow to the string, then tried to draw the shaft back to his ear. At the first pull, he didn’t use enough strength. His friends jeered. Gritting his teeth, he tried again. This time, the bow bent. He turned it away from his fellows and let fly. They all exclaimed in surprise at how far the arrow flew.

  “There’s the wizard!” Hirundo pointed as Pterocles emerged from a clump of bushes. “I thought the rascal had gone and disappeared himself this time.”

  When Grus waved, Pterocles nodded back and made his way toward the king. Grus clasped his hand and slapped him on the back. Pterocles, none too steady on his feet, almost fell over. Holding him up, Grus said, “Well done!”

  “Er—thank you, Your Majesty.” Pterocles did not sound like a man who’d just helped win a good-sized victory. He sounded more like one who’d had too much to drink and was about to sick up much of what he’d poured down. His greenish color suggested the same.

  “Are you all right?” Grus asked.

  Pterocles shrugged. “If you love me, Your Majesty—or even if you hate me, but not too much—do me the courtesy of never asking me to use that masking spell against the Menteshe again.” He gulped, and then ran back into the bushes from which he’d just emerged. When he came out again, his face was deathly pale, but he looked better. He might have gotten rid of some of what ailed him.

  “Your spell here helped us win,” Grus said, surprised and puzzled. “Why not use it again?”

  “Why not?” The wizard took a deep breath—almost a sob. “I’ll tell you why not, Your Majesty. I was holding the spell against the Menteshe horsemen. Thus far, well and good. Then I was holding it against Ulash’s wizards, which was not such an easy thing, but I managed well enough. But soon I was also holding it against the Banished One—and gods spare me from ever having to do that again.” He sat down on the ground; his legs didn’t seem to want to hold him up anymore.

  “But you did it.” The king squatted beside him.

  “Oh, yes. I did it.” Pterocles’ voice was hollow, not proud. “He didn’t take the spell seriously, you might say, until too late. By the time he grew fully aware of it and realized it might hurt his followers, it already had. He doesn’t make mistakes twice. He doesn’t make many mistakes once.”

  And what would you expect from a foe who was a god? Grus wondered. But Pterocles already knew about that—not all about it, but enough. “It will be as you say,” Grus promised, and the wizard’s shoulders sagged with relief.

  The forest smelled clean and green. When King Lanius was in the city of Avornis, he didn’t notice the mingled stinks of dung and smoke and unwashed people crowded too close together. When he left, which wasn’t often enough, the air seemed perfumed in his nostrils. He relished each inhalation and regretted every breath he had to let out. He also regretted having to go back to the capital when this day ended. He knew he would smell the stench he usually ignored.

  And part of him regretted letting Arch-Hallow Anser talk him into coming along on another hunt. After the first one the year before, he’d vowed never to go hunting again. But this excursion had promised to be too interesting for him to refuse. For Prince Ortalis also rode with Anser—and the prince and the arch-hallow had quarreled years before Lanius disappointed Anser by being immune to the thrills of the chase.

  King Grus, of course, was down in the southern provinces fighting the Menteshe. And yet, though he’d gone hundreds of miles, his influence still lingered over the city of Avornis—and, indeed, over the hunting party. Here were his legitimate son, his bastard, and his son-in-law. Had he not taken the crown, would any of the three younger men even have met the other two? Lanius doubted it. He would have been just as well pleased never to have made Ortalis’ acquaintance, but it was years too late to worry about that.

  Some of their beaters were men Anser regularly used in his sport—lean, silent fellows in leather jerkins and caps who slipped through the trees with the silent skill of practiced poachers. The rest were Lanius’ royal bodyguards. The men who served Anser sneered at their jingling mailshirts. The bodyguards pretended not to hear. They were along to protect King Lanius first. If they happened to flush out a stag or a wildcat, so much the better.

  Lanius suspected that Anser’s beaters might end up beaten after the hunting party went back to the city of Avornis. The bodyguards, sensitive to the royal mood, didn’t want to spoil the day. But they weren’t used to being mocked, and they had long memories for slights. The men who put Lanius in mind of poachers seemed strong and tough enough, but the royal guardsmen were the best Avornis had.

  A sharp, staccato drumming high up in an oak made Lanius’ head whip around. Laughing, Anser said, “It’s nothing—only a woodpecker.”

  “What kind?” the king asked. “One of the big black ones with the red crest, or the small ones that are all black and white stripes, or a flicker with a black mustache?”

  Anser blinked. Ortalis laughed. “Trust Lanius to know about woodpeckers,” he said. Lanius listened for the malice that usually informed Ortalis’ words. He didn’t hear it. Maybe not hearing it was wishful thinking on his part. Or maybe being married to Limosa agreed with Grus’ son—at least so far. And Lanius didn’t know as much about woodpeckers, or birds in general, as he would have liked to, but he was learning.

  The drumming rang through the woods again. One of the soft-moving men in a jerkin said, “Your Majesty, that’s the noise those small, stripy woodpeckers make. The others, the bigger birds, drum more slowly.”

  “Thank you,” Lanius said.

  “Yes, thank you,” Anser agreed. “I’ve found something out, too. Who would have wondered about woodpeckers?”

  “Let’s push on,” Ortalis said. “We’ve still got a lot of hunting ahead of us, woodpeckers or no woodpeckers.”

  Anser’s beater vanished among the trees, to drive game back toward the men with rank enough to kill it. Some of Lanius’ guardsmen went with them. More, though, stayed behind with the king. “They take no chances, do they?” Anser said.

  “We don’t get paid to take chances, Your Arch-Reverence.” A guard spoke up before the king could.

  A stag bounded past. Ortalis had his bow drawn and an arrow hissing through the air before Lanius even began to raise his bow. I am a hopeless dub at this, Lanius thought. I will always be a hopeless dub at this. Ortalis, meanwhile, whooped. “That’s a hit!” he called, and loped after the deer.

  In the palace, Grus’ legitimate son seemed as useless a mortal as any Lanius had ever seen. Here in the field, he proved to know what he was doing. Following in his wake, Lanius saw blood splashed on leaves and bushes. He did not care for the pursuit of wounded animals. Killing beasts cleanly was one thing. Inflicting such suffering as this on them struck him as something else again.

  It was something else for Ortalis, too—something he relished, as his excited chatter showed. Lanius would have sneered at his bloodlust—Lanius had sneered at his bloodlust in the past—but he’d also seen Anser get excited in the chase. The arch-hallow was mild as milk when he wasn’t hunting. The king didn’t understand the transformation. Understand it or not, though, he couldn’t deny it was real.

  “Nice shot, Your Highness,” one of the beaters told Ort
alis. “He went down right quick there.” It hadn’t seemed quick to Lanius, who brushed a twig from his hair as he came up. He didn’t think it had seemed quick to the stag, either.

  Ortalis’ eyes glowed. He knelt beside the fallen deer. Its sides still heaved feebly as it fought to suck in air. Bloody froth showed at each nostril; Ortalis’ arrow must have punctured a lung. Drawing a belt knife, Ortalis cut the stag’s throat. More blood yet poured out onto his hands and the ground. “Ah,” he said softly, as he might have after a woman. Lanius’ stomach lurched. He turned away, hoping breakfast would stay down.

  It did. When he looked back, Ortalis was plunging the knife into the deer’s belly to butcher it. The animal’s eyes were opaque and lusterless now. That obvious proof of death helped ease the king’s conscience along with his nausea. Ortalis went right on with the butchering. He seemed to enjoy it as much as the killing.

  Looking up from the work, he remarked, “It’s a bloody job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

  Lanius managed to nod. It wasn’t that Ortalis was wrong. But did a butcher have to do his work with such fiendish gusto? Lanius doubted that. He’d doubted it for years.

  Getting back on the trail was a relief for him, if not for Ortalis. Anser had the first shot at the next stag they saw, had it and missed. He cursed good-naturedly, but with enough pointed comments to startle anyone who, after hearing him, might suddenly learn he was Arch-Hallow of Avornis.

  Nodding to Lanius, Anser said, “Next one we see, Your Majesty, you can let fly first.”

  “That’s all right,” Lanius said; the honor was one he would gladly have done without. But both the arch-hallow and Prince Ortalis sent him looks full of horror. Even his own guardsmen clucked disapprovingly. Without even knowing it, he’d broken some hunt custom. He did his best to repair things, adding, “I just don’t want a deer to get away—I’m not much of a shot.” The last part of that was true, the first part one of the bigger lies he’d ever told.

  But, because he had a reputation for sticking to the truth no matter what, both Anser and Ortalis accepted his words. “Don’t worry, Your Majesty,” Anser said. “I missed, and the world won’t end if you do, too, as long as you try your best.”

  “Of course,” said the king, who still couldn’t stomach the idea of shooting at an animal for the sport of it.

  But, before long, he had to try. A magnificent stag stood at the edge of a clearing twenty or thirty yards away. The wind blew from the stag to the hunters; the beast, which depended so much on its sensitive nose, had not the slightest notion they were there. Reluctantly, Lanius drew his bow and let fly. The arrow flew alarmingly straight. For a bad heartbeat, he feared he’d actually hit what he aimed at. The shaft zipped over the deer’s back and thudded into the pale, parchment-barked trunk of a birch behind it.

  The stag bounded away. But Anser and Ortalis’ bowstrings twanged in the same instant. One of those shafts struck home. The stag crashed to the ground in the middle of a leap. The arch-hallow and the prince both cried out in triumph.

  And they both turned to Lanius. “Well shot!” Ortalis told him. “You spooked it perfectly. Now Anser and I have to see who got the kill.”

  By the time they reached the carcass, the deer, mercifully, was already dead. It had two arrows in it—one in the throat, the other through the ribs. Ortalis had loosed the first, Anser the second. They began arguing over who deserved credit for bringing down the stag. “Perhaps,” Lanius said diffidently, “you should share the—” He broke off. He’d almost said blame. That was what he thought of the whole business, but he knew it wouldn’t do.

  Even though he’d stopped, prince and arch-hallow both stared at him as though he’d started spouting the Chernagors’ throaty language. Then they went back to their argument. He wondered if he’d violated some other unwritten rule of the hunt.

  Thinking of unwritten rules made him wonder if there were written ones. Poking through the archives trying to find out would be more fun than looking at flies beginning to settle in the blood that had spilled from the stag, and to walk across the eyeballs that could no longer blink them away.

  Again, Ortalis got the privilege—if that was what it was—of butchering the deer. He made the gory job as neat as he could. Even so, Lanius saw, or thought he saw, a gleam of satisfaction in his brother-in-laws eyes. It could be worse, the king thought. If he were hunting women, the way he’d wanted to, he’d butcher them after he made the kill.

  He shivered. No, he didn’t think Ortalis had been joking about that, not at all. And he was anything but reassured when Grus’ legitimate son, after wiping his gory hands on the grass, licked the last of the stag’s blood from his fingers. Ortalis smacked his lips, too, as though at fine wine.

  Anser and the beaters seemed to find nothing wrong with that. Lanius told himself he was worrying too much. He also told himself he would be glad to eat the venison the hunt was bringing home. He believed that. Try as he would, though, he couldn’t make himself believe the other.

  Sestus lay by the Arzus River. When Grus’ army reached the city, the Menteshe had had it under siege for some little while. Their idea of besieging a town was different from Grus’ at Nishevatz. They didn’t aim to storm the walls. They had no catapults or battering rams to knock down its towers. But that didn’t mean they’d had no chance of forcing the place to yield. If the royal army hadn’t come when it did, they probably would have done just that.

  They’d ravaged the farms around Sestus. Not a cow, not a sheep, not a pig survived. Not many farmers did, either. The Menteshe had trampled or burned most of the wheatfields within a day’s ride of the town. Vineyards and olive groves and almond orchards also went under the ax or the torch. The Arzus was not a wide stream. Menteshe on the banks had peppered with arrows the ships that tried to bring grain into Sestus. They hadn’t stopped all of them, but they had made skippers most reluctant to run their gauntlet. Little by little, Sestus had started starving.

  Prince Ulash’s men didn’t put up much of a fight when the Avornan army thundered down on them. The nomads simply rode away. Why not? They could afflict some other city, and the devastation they’d left behind remained. Sestus would have a hard and hungry time of it now, regardless of whether it had opened its gates to the Menteshe.

  Riding through fields black with soot or prematurely yellow and dead, Grus saw that at once. It was, understandably, less obvious to the local governor, a bald baron named Butastur. He rode out from the city to welcome the king. “By the gods, Your Majesty, it’s good to see you here!” he said, beaming. “Another couple of weeks of those demons prowling around out there and we’d’ve been eating the grass that grows between the ruts in the street and boiling shoeleather for soup.”

  “I’m glad it won’t come to that.” Grus wasn’t beaming; he was grim. His wave encompassed the ravaged fields. “Only Queen Quelea can judge how much you’ll be able to salvage from this.”

  Butastur nodded. “Oh, yes. We’ll be a while getting over this, no doubt about it. But now you’ll be able to bring supplies in to us from places where the cursed Menteshe haven’t reached.”

  He sounded as confident as a little boy who was sure his father could reach out, pluck the moon from the sky, and hand it to him on a string. Grus hated to disillusion him, but felt he had no choice. “We’ll be able to do something for you, Baron,” he said, “but I’m not sure how much. Sestus isn’t the only hungry city, and yours aren’t the only fields the nomads have ruined. This is a big invasion—look how far north you are, and we’re only now reaching you.”

  By Butastur’s expression, he cared not a pin for any other part of Avornis unless it could send him food. “Surely you can’t mean you’re going to let us famish here!” he cried. “What have we done to deserve such a fate?”

  “You haven’t done anything to deserve it,” Grus answered. “I hope it doesn’t happen. But I don’t know if I can do all I’d like to help you, because this isn’t the only town in the kingdom that
’s suffering.”

  He might as well have saved his breath, for all the effect his words had on Butastur. “Ruined!” the baron said, and tugged at his bushy beard as though he wanted to get credit for pulling chunks out by the roots. “Ruined by the cursed barbarians, and even my sovereign will do nothing to relieve my city’s suffering!”

  “You seem to misunderstand me on purpose,” Grus said.

  Butastur, by now, wasn’t even listening to him, let alone understanding. “Ruined!” he cried once again, more piteously than ever. “How shall we ever recover from the ravages of the Menteshe?”

  Grus lost his temper. He’d just paid in blood to drive the nomads away from Sestus, and the local governor seemed not to have noticed. “How will you recover?” he growled. “Shutting up and buckling down to repair the damage makes a good start. I told you I’d do what I could for you. I just don’t know how much that’s going to be. Am I plain enough, Your Excellency?”

  Butastur flinched away from him as though he were one of Prince Ulash’s torturers. “Yes, yes, Your Majesty,” he said. But he didn’t speak from conviction. He just didn’t dare argue. Grus had seen plenty of palace servants who yielded to authority like that—not because, it was right, but because it was authority, and something worse would happen to them if they didn’t.

  Crossing the Arzus in pursuit of the Menteshe came as nothing but a relief. When the army camped that evening, the king turned to Hirundo and said, “I can fight the nomads. But what am I supposed to do when someone on my own side makes me want to hang him from the tallest tower in his town?”

  “You could go ahead and hang him,” the general answered. “You’d have a lot fewer idiots bothering you afterwards.”

  “Don’t tempt me,” Grus said. “But if I start hanging all the fools in Avornis, how many people will be left alive in six months’ time? And who hangs me, for being fool enough to start hanging fools in the first place?”