The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  Grus started to say no. Then he hesitated. Like anyone who hesitated, he was lost. Trying not to admit it even to himself, he warned Alauda, “You know I have a queen. You won’t come back to the city of Avornis with me, no matter what.”

  “Yes, of course I know that,” Alauda said impatiently. “I told you, I hope I’m not silly. And by the gods, Your Majesty, I’m not out for what I can get, except maybe this.” She took hold of him, then sighed. “It’s been a bit since my husband died. I’d almost forgotten how much I missed it.”

  “You say that now,” Grus told her. “Some people say things like that, and then later on they forget what they’ve said. I wouldn’t be very happy—and neither would you—if that happened.”

  “You’ve got a bargain,” Alauda said at once. “Does that mean the rest of it’s a bargain, too?” Before he could answer, she went on, “I’ll keep up my end.” She laughed again. “And I’ll keep up your end. That’s part of the bargain, isn’t it?”

  “I hope so,” Grus answered. “I was just thinking I’m not so young anymore—but yes, I do hope so.”

  Summer heat beat down on the city of Avornis. People who’d spent time in the south said it wasn’t all that bad, but it was plenty bad enough to suit Lanius. Plants began to wilt and turn yellow. Flies and other bugs multiplied as though by magic. Little lizards came out of what seemed to be nowhere but were probably crevices in boards and holes in the ground to eat the bugs, or at least some of them.

  King Lanius and everyone else in the royal palace did what they could to beat the heat. He doffed the royal robes and plunged into the river naked as the day he was born. That brought relief, but only for a little while. However much he wanted to, though, he couldn’t stay in the water all the time.

  Arch-Hallow Anser and Prince Ortalis disappeared into the woods to hunt for days at a time. Anser tried to talk Lanius into coming along, but the king remained unconvinced that that was a good bargain. Yes, the woods were probably cooler than the city, but weren’t they also going to be buggier? Lanius thought so, and stayed in the royal palace.

  The monkeys flourished in the heat. Even their mustaches seemed to stick out farther from their faces than before. They ate better than they ever had, and bounced through the branches and sticks in their rooms with fresh energy. As far as they were concerned, it could stay hot forever.

  Not so the moncats. The Chernagor merchant who’d brought the first pair to the palace had told Lanius they came from islands in the Northern Sea—islands with, the king supposed, a cooler climate than that of the city of Avornis. They drooped in the heat the same way flowers did. Lanius made sure they had plenty of water and that it was changed often so it stayed fresh. Past that, he didn’t know what he could do.

  One thing could jolt the moncats out of their lethargy. Whenever a lizard was foolish enough to show itself in their rooms, they would go after it with an enthusiasm Lanius had hardly ever seen from them. They got the same thrill from chasing lizards as Anser did from chasing deer (Lanius resolutely refused to think about what sort of thrill Ortalis got from chasing deer). And, like Anser, they got to devour their quarry at the end of a successful hunt.

  Lanius suddenly imagined the arch-hallow, in full ecclesiastical regalia, with a still-twitching lizard tail hanging from the corner of his mouth. He started laughing so hard, he frightened the moncats and made servants out in the hallway pound on the door and ask what was wrong.

  “Nothing,” he called back, feeling like a little boy whose parents demanded out of the blue what he was doing when it was something naughty.

  “Then what’s that racket, Your Majesty?” The voice on the other side of the door sounded suspicious, even accusing. Was that Bubulcus out there in the hallway? Lanius thought so, but couldn’t be sure.

  Whether it was Bubulcus or not, the king knew he had to say, “Nothing,” again, and he did. He couldn’t expect the servants to find that blasphemous image funny. He was more than a little scandalized that he found it funny himself, but he did, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

  “Are you sure, Your Majesty?” the servant asked dubiously.

  “I’m positive,” Lanius answered. “One of the moncats did something foolish, and I was laughing, that’s all.” That wasn’t quite what had happened, but it came close enough.

  “Huh,” came from the corridor. That made Lanius more nearly certain it was Bubulcus out there. Whoever it was, he went away; the king listened with no small relief to receding footsteps. When Lanius came out of the moncats’ room, no one asked him any more questions. That suited him fine.

  Two days later, the hot spell broke. Clouds rolled down from the north. When morning came, the city of Avornis found itself wrapped in chilly mist. Lanius hurried down to the monkeys’ room and lit the fire that he’d allowed to die over the past few days. They needed defense against the cold once more, and he made sure they got it.

  It started to rain that afternoon. To his horror, Lanius discovered a leak in the roof of the royal archives. He sent men up there to fix it, or at least to cover it, in spite of the rain. There were certain advantages to being the King of Avornis. A luckless homeowner would have had to wait for good weather. But Lanius couldn’t stand the notion of water dripping down onto the precious and irreplaceable parchments in the archives. Being who he was, he didn’t have to stand for it, either.

  Grus looked down from the hills on a riverside town. Like a lot of riverside towns, it had had its croplands ravaged. He’d seen far worse devastation elsewhere, though. The landscape wasn’t what kept him staring and staring.

  “Pelagonia,” he murmured.

  Hirundo nodded. “That’s what it is, all right,” he said. “Looks like a provincial town to me.”

  “And so it is,” Grus agreed. But that wasn’t all it was, not to him. Just seeing it made his heart beat faster.

  Pterocles understood, but then Pterocles had a wizard’s memory for detail. “This is the place where you sent the witch,” he said. “Will you ship me back to the city of Avornis and turn her loose on the Menteshe?”

  It had crossed Grus’ mind. Shipping Alauda back to her cousin’s tavern had also crossed his mind. He hadn’t seen Alca for three years, not since his wife made him send her away. Life gets more complicated all the time, he thought, and laughed, even though it wasn’t funny.

  “Well, Your Majesty?” Pterocles spoke with unwonted sharpness. “Will you?”

  He’d had trouble standing up against the Banished One. Of course, so had Alca. Any mortal wizard had trouble standing up against the Banished One. Grus found his answer. “No, I won’t,” he said. “We’re all on the same side in this fight, or we’d better be.”

  He waited to see what Pterocles would say to that. To his relief, the wizard only nodded. “Can’t say you’re wrong. She acts like she’s pretty snooty, but her heart’s in the right place.”

  Grus bristled at any criticism of his former lover. Fighting to hold on to his temper, he asked Hirundo, “Can we reach the town tonight?”

  “I doubt it,” the general replied. “Tomorrow, yes. Tonight? We’re farther away than you think.”

  Grus stared south. Only the keep and the spires of the cathedral showed above Pelagonia’s gray stone walls. In the nearer distance, a handful of Menteshe rode through the burnt fields in front of the town. They would flee when the Avornan army advanced. Grus knew a lot about fighting the nomads. Unless they had everything their own way, they didn’t care for stand-up fights. Why should they? Starvation and raids unceasing worked well for them.

  “Tomorrow, then,” the King of Avornis said, reluctance and eagerness warring in his voice—reluctance at the delay, eagerness at what might come afterwards. Alca. His lips silently shaped the name.

  As he’d thought they would, Prince Ulash’s men withdrew at the Avornan host’s advance. He and Hirundo picked a good campground, one by a stream so the Menteshe couldn’t cut them off from water—a favorite trick of theirs. He also made cert
ain he scattered sentries widely about the camp.

  “Is something wrong?” Alauda asked in his tent that night.

  “No,” Grus answered, quicker than he should have. Then, hearing that too-quick word, he had to try to explain himself. “I just want to make sure the town is safe.”

  The explanation sounded false, too. Alauda didn’t challenge him about it. Who was she—a barmaid, a whim, a toy—to challenge a king? No one, and she had sense enough to know it. But she also had the sense to hear that Grus wasn’t telling her the truth, or all of the truth. No, she said not a thing, but her eyes showed her hurt.

  When they made love that night, she rode Grus with a fierce desperation she’d never shown before. Maybe she sensed he worried more about someone inside Pelagonia than about the city itself. Was she trying to show him he needed to worry about her, too? After the day’s travel and after that ferocious coupling, Grus worried about nothing and nobody, but plunged headlong into sleep, one arm still around Alauda.

  He almost died before dawn, with no chance to worry about Alauda or Alca or, for that matter, Estrilda. The Menteshe often shied away from stand-up fights, yes. But a night attack, an assault that caught their enemies by surprise, was a different story.

  Their wizards must have found some way to fuddle the sentries, for the Avornans knew nothing of their onslaught until moments before it broke upon them. They would have been caught altogether unaware if Pterocles hadn’t started up from his pallet, shouting, “Danger! Danger!” By the confused shock in his voice, he didn’t even know what sort of danger it was, only that it was real and it was close.

  His cry woke Grus. The king’s dreams had been of anything but danger. When he woke, one of Alauda’s breasts filled his hand. He’d known that even in his sleep, and it had colored and heated his imaginings.

  Now … now, along with the wizard’s shouts of alarm, he heard the oncoming thunder of hoofbeats and harsh war cries in a language not Avornan. Cursing, he realized at least some of what must have happened. He threw on drawers, jammed a helmet down on his head, seized sword and shield, and ran, otherwise naked, from the tent.

  “Out!” Grus shouted at the top of his lungs. “Out and fight! Quick, before they kill you all!”

  Soldiers started spilling from their tents. In the crimson light of the dying campfires, they might have been dipped in blood. Many of them were as erratically armed and armored as the king himself—this one had a sword, that one a mailshirt, the other a shield, another a bow.

  They were a poor lot to try to stop the rampaging Menteshe. And yet the nomads seemed to have looked for no opposition whatever. They cried out in surprise and alarm when Avornans rushed forward to slash at them, to pull them from their horses, and to shoot arrows at them. They’d been looking to murder Grus’ soldiers in their tents, to take them altogether unawares. Whatever happened, that wouldn’t. More and more Avornans streamed into the fight, these more fully armed than the first few.

  One of Prince Ulash’s men reined in right in front of Grus. The nomad stared around, looking for foes on horseback. He found none—and had no idea Grus was there until the king yanked him out of the saddle. He had time for one startled squawk before landing in a campfire. He didn’t squawk after that. He shrieked. The fire was dying, but not yet dead. And the coals flared to new life when he crashed down on them.

  As for Grus, he sprang into the saddle without even thinking about how little he cared for horses and horsemanship. The pony under him bucked at the sudden change of riders. He cuffed it into submission, yelling, “Avornis! Avornis! To me, men! We can beat these cursed raiders!”

  “King Grus!” shouted a soldier who recognized his voice. An instant later, a hundred, a thousand throats had taken up the cry. “King Grus! Hurrah for King Grus!”

  That proved a mixed blessing. His own men did rally to him. But the Menteshe cried out, too, and pressed him as hard as they could in the crimson-shot darkness. Arrow after arrow hissed past his head. If the archers had been able to see clearly what they were shooting at, he doubted he could have lasted long. At night, though, they kept missing. Even as he slashed with his sword, he breathed prayers of thanks to the gods.

  In the screaming, cursing chaos, he took longer to realize something than he should have. When he did, he bawled it out as loud as he could. “There aren’t very many of them. Hit them hard! We can beat them!”

  Maybe the magic—Grus presumed it was magic—that had let the Menteshe slip past his sentries couldn’t have hidden more of them; Pterocles had also had trouble masking too many men. Whatever the reason, this wasn’t an assault by their whole army, as he’d feared when Pterocles’ cry of alarm first woke him. It was a raid. It could have been a costly raid, but now it wouldn’t be.

  Prince Ulash’s men didn’t need much more time to figure that out for themselves. When they did, they weren’t ashamed to flee. The Avornans spent some small, panicky stretch of time striking at one another before they realized the enemy had gone.

  More fuel went on the fires. As they flared up, Hirundo waved to Grus. “Well, that’s one way to settle your supper,” the general said cheerfully.

  Grus noticed three or four cuts, luckily all small, that he’d ignored in the heat of battle. “For a little while there, I wondered if we’d get settled along with supper,” he remarked. Hirundo laughed, as though the Menteshe had done no more than play a clever joke on the Avornan army. Grus was in no mood for laughter. He raised his voice, shouting, “Pterocles!”

  He had to call the wizard’s name several times before he got an answer. He’d begun to fear the nomads had slain Pterocles. No sorcerer was immune to an arrow through the throat or a sword cut that tore out his vitals. But; at length, Pterocles limped into the firelight. He had an arrow through him, all right, but through one calf. He’d wrapped a rag around the wound. Not even the ruddy light of the flames could make his face anything but pallid.

  “Are you all right?” Grus exclaimed.

  “That depends, Your Majesty,” the wizard said, biting his lip against the pain. “Is the wound likely to kill me? No. Do I wish I didn’t have it? Yes.”

  Hirundo said, “I’ve never known a wound I was glad I had.”

  “Nor I,” Grus agreed. “Have a healer draw the shaft and give you opium for the pain. You’re lucky the arrowhead went through—the healer won’t have to cut it out of you.”

  “Lucky.” Pterocles savored the word. After a moment, he shook his head. “If I were lucky, it would have missed me.”

  Grus nodded, yielding the point. He said, “We’re all lucky you sensed the nomads coming. What sort of spell did they use to get past the sentries, and can we make sure it won’t work if they try it again?”

  “A masking spell on the sentries,” Pterocles answered. “A masking spell on them, and a sleep spell on me—maybe on this whole camp, but I think just on me—so we wouldn’t know the Menteshe were here until too late. It might have done everything the nomads wanted if I hadn’t had an extra cup of wine last night.”

  “What’s that?” Hirundo said. “Wine makes me sleepy.”

  The wizard managed a bloodless smile, though blood was darkening the cloth he’d put around his wounded leg. He said, “Wine makes me sleepy, too. But it also makes me wake up in the middle of the night—which I did, for I had to piss or burst. And when I woke …”

  Hirundo clapped his hands. Grus was sure that was the first time he’d ever heard anyone’s bladder applauded. “Stay where you are. Don’t move on it anymore,” the king told Pterocles, and turned to a soldier standing not far away. “Fetch a healer to treat the wizard’s wound.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.” The man hurried off.

  “You didn’t answer the second half of my question,” Grus said to Pterocles. “Can we make sure Ulash’s men don’t get away with this again?”

  Pterocles said, “The sleep spell isn’t easy. It caught me by surprise this time. It won’t the next.”

  “What about other wiz
ards?” Grus asked.

  “I can let them know what to be wary of,” Pterocles told him. “That will give them a good chance to steer clear of the spell, anyhow.”

  “Better than nothing,” Grus said. It wasn’t enough to suit him, but he judged it would have to do. His army had come through here. And tomorrow … Tomorrow, Pelagonia, he thought.

  Sosia hurried up to Lanius. Some strong emotion was on her face. Had she found out he’d been dallying with serving women again? He didn’t want to go through another row.

  But instead of screaming at him or trying to slap his face, Sosia burst out, “He does! Oh, Lanius, he does!”

  Lanius knew he was gaping foolishly. He couldn’t help himself. “Who does?” he inquired. “And, for that matter, who does what?”

  She stared at him as though he should have understood at once what she was talking about. “My brother,” she answered with a grimace. “And he does … what you’d expect.”

  “Are you sure?” Lanius grimaced, too. That was very unwelcome news. “Ortalis is hurting serving girls again, even though he’s hunting? Even though he’s got a wife?”

  “No, no, no!” Sosia’s expression said she’d been right the first time—he was an idiot. “He’s hurting Limosa.”

  “You’re crazy.” The words were out of Lanius’ mouth before he had the chance to regret them. Even then, only part of him did regret them, for he went on, “I saw her yesterday. She looked as happy as a moncat with a lizard to chase. She’s looked—and sounded—that way ever since they got married. I don’t know why, but she has. She loves your brother, Sosia. She’s not pretending. Nobody’s that good an actress. And he does go out hunting. If he were hurting her, she could come to you or to me or to Anser and scream her head off. She hasn’t. She doesn’t need to do it, yes?”

  “I don’t know.” Now his wife looked confused.

  “What exactly do you know? And how do you know it?”

  “I know Limosa’s got scars on her back, the same sort of scars … the same sort of scars Ortalis has put on other girls,” Sosia answered. Lanius grimaced again, remembering Cristata’s ravaged back. Sosia’s eyes said she noticed him remembering, and knew he was remembering the rest of Cristata, too. But she visibly pushed that aside for the time being and continued, “And I know because a serving woman happened to walk in on Limosa while she was bathing. She doesn’t usually let any servants attend her then, and that’s strange all by itself.”