The Chernagor Pirates

by Harry Turtledove

  “Pouncer doesn’t think it’s a miserable creature,” Lanius told the pudgy cook. “Talented would probably be a better word.”

  “Talented, foof!” Quiscula said. “Plenty of thieves on two legs are talented, too, and what happens to them when they get caught? Not half what they deserve, a lot of the time.”

  “Thieves who go on two legs know the difference between right and wrong,” Lanius said. “The moncat doesn’t.” He paused. “I don’t think it does, anyhow.”

  “A likely story,” Quiscula said. “It’s a wicked beast, and you can’t tell me any different, so don’t waste your breath trying.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it.” Lanius held out the spoon. “Here. Take charge of this until Pouncer decides to steal it again.”

  “Oh, you’re too generous to me, Your Majesty!” Quiscula played the coquette so well, she and Lanius both started laughing. She accepted the spoon from the king.

  Lanius started back toward the archives, wondering if he would ever get to look for those parchments. Everything seemed to be conspiring against him. And everything, today, included Princess Limosa, who was carrying her baby down the corridor. “Hello, Your Majesty,” Limosa said. “Isn’t Capella the sweetest little thing you ever saw?”

  “Well …” Lanius wondered how to answer that and stay truthful and polite at the same time. Truth won. He said, “If you don’t count Crex and Pitta, yes.”

  Limosa stared at him, then giggled. “All right, that’s fair enough. Who doesn’t think their children are the most wonderful ones in the world?”

  “I can’t think of anybody,” Lanius said. “That’s what keeps us from feeding our children to the hunting hounds, I suppose.”

  Limosa’s eyes got even wider than they had been before. She hugged Capella a little tighter and hurried away as though she feared Lanius had some dreadful, contagious disease. He wondered why. He hadn’t said he wanted to feed Capella—or any other children—to hunting hounds. He sighed. Some people just didn’t listen.

  He’d just started searching through the spots likeliest to hold the missing documents when somebody began banging on the door to the archives. The king said something pungent. The servants knew they weren’t supposed to do things like that. Bubulcus, the one who’d been most likely to “forget” such warnings, was dead. Either someone was making a dreadful mistake or something dreadful, something he really needed to know about, had just happened. Adding a few more choice phrases under his breath, he went to see who was bothering him in his sanctum.

  “Sosia!” he said in astonishment. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

  “I was going to ask you the same question,” his wife answered. “What on earth did you say to Limosa? Queen Quelea’s mercy, it’s frightened the life out of her, whatever it was.”

  “Oh, by the gods!” Lanius clapped a hand to his forehead in exasperation altogether unfeigned. “She really doesn’t listen.” He spelled out exactly what he’d said to Limosa.

  Even before he got halfway through, one of Sosia’s eyebrows started climbing. Lanius had seen that expression more often on Grus than on his wife. He liked it no better on her. Once he’d finished, she said, “Well, I don’t blame Limosa a bit. Poor thing! Hunting dogs, indeed! You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “You weren’t listening, either,” Lanius complained. “I didn’t say that was what we did with children. I didn’t say it was what we should do. I said it was what we would do if the people who had them didn’t think they were wonderful. Don’t you see the difference?”

  “What I see is that nobody’s got any business talking about feeding babies to any hounds.” Sosia spoke with impressive certainty. “And that goes double for talking about babies and hounds to somebody who’s just had one. Had a baby, I mean.” She wagged a finger at him. “You’re not going to make me sound foolish. This is important.”

  “I wasn’t. This is already nothing but foolishness,” Lanius said.

  “It certainly is—your foolishness. Next time you see Limosa, you apologize to her, do you hear me?” Sosia didn’t wait for an answer. She stared past Lanius into the cavernous archives. “So this is where you spend all your time. I feel as though I’m looking at the other woman.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Lanius said, although that comparison made much more sense to him than the other one had. “And I still don’t see why you want me to apologize to Limosa when I didn’t say anything bad to begin with.”

  “Yes, you did. You’re just too—too logical to know it.” Sosia turned her back and stalked off. Over her shoulder, she added, “And if you think people run on logic all the time, you’d better think again.”

  “I don’t think anything of the sort. People cured me of it a long time ago,” Lanius said plaintively. Sosia didn’t even slow down. She went around a corner and disappeared. The king almost chased after her to go on explaining. But he realized—logically—that it wouldn’t do him any good, and so he stayed where he was.

  When he could no longer hear Sosia’s angry footsteps, he shut the door to the archives once more. For good measure, he barred it behind him. Then he went back to looking for the parchments from Durdevatz.

  He searched on and off for four days, and finally found them by accident. If he had told Sosia about that, she would either have laughed at him or rolled her eyes in despair. He’d forgotten he’d put the parchments in a stout wooden box to keep them safe. How many times had he walked past it without paying it any mind? More than he wanted to think about—he was sure of that. If he hadn’t barked his knuckles on a corner of the box, he might never have found the documents at all.

  That moment of sudden, unexpected pain made him take a long, reproachful look at the box. When he recognized it, he still felt reproachful—self-reproachful. After all that searching—and after its ludicrous end—he was almost afraid to look at the parchments. If they turned out to be worthless or dull, how could he stand it?

  Of course, if he didn’t look at them, why had he gone to all the trouble of finding them? After rubbing his hand, he carried the box over to the table where he’d written most of How to Be a King. When he opened the box, he started to laugh. The Chernagors had made him happy with some of the cheapest presents ever given to a King of Avornis—a pair of moncats, a pair of monkeys, and a pile of documents dug out of a decrepit cathedral. For all he knew, merchants in the north country laughed whenever they heard his name.

  He didn’t care. Happiness and having enough money weren’t the same thing. He’d been happy enough even at times when Grus squeezed him hardest. That money and happiness weren’t the same thing didn’t mean happiness had nothing to do with money. Lanius’ intuition, though, didn’t reach that far.

  The first few parchments he unrolled and read had to do with the cathedral, not with anything that went on inside it. They included a letter from the yellow-robed high-hallow then presiding in the building asking a long-dead King of Avornis for funds to repair it and add to its mosaic decoration. The letter had come to the capital and gone back to what was then Argithea, not Durdevatz, with the king’s scribbled comment and signature below it. We are not made of silver, the sovereign had written. If the projects are worthy, surely your townsfolk will support them. If they are not, all the silver in the world will not make them so.

  Lanius studied that with considerable admiration. “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” he murmured. He studied the response until he’d memorized it. He could think of so many places to use it.…

  Other documents told him more about the history of Argithea than he’d ever known before. Some of them talked about the Chernagors as sea raiders. Up until then, he’d seen only a couple of parchments like that. They proved Argithea hadn’t been the first town along the coast of the Northern Sea to fall to the Chernagors. Lanius tried to remember whether he’d known that before. Try as he would, he couldn’t be sure.

  More appeals—for money and for aid—to the capital followed, from the
city governor and from the high-ranking priest at the cathedral. Only one of them had any sort of reply. A relieving force is on the way, the answer said. Hold out until it arrives.

  There were no more letters in Avornan after the date of that one. The messenger bringing the answer must have managed to slip through the besieging Chernagors; Lanius had read elsewhere that they hadn’t been polished at the art of taking cities. Polished or not, though, they’d surely taken Argithea before the promised relieving force arrived. They must have kept the Avornans from recapturing the town, too. From then on, the history of Argithea ended and that of Durdevatz began.

  One parchment still sat at the bottom of the box. Lanius pulled it out as much from a sense of duty as for any other reason. Since he was going through the documents, he thought he ought to go through all of them. He didn’t expect anything more interesting or exciting than what he’d already found.

  But the first sentence caught and held his eye. I wonder why I have written this, it said, when no one is ever likely to read it, or to understand it if he does. After that, he couldn’t have stopped reading for anything. The author was a black-robed priest named Xenops. He had been consecrated the year before the Chernagors took Argithea out of the Kingdom of Avornis, and had stayed on at the cathedral under the town’s new masters for the next fifty years and more.

  “Olor’s beard!” Lanius whispered. “This shows how Durdevatz passed from one world to the other.” He’d never imagined seeing such a document. In their early years in these parts, the Chernagors hadn’t written in Avornan or their own language or any other. And he had not thought any Avornans left behind in the north had set down what they’d seen and heard and felt. No such chronicles existed in the royal archives—he was sure of that. A moment later, he shook his head. One did now.

  Xenops had caught moments in the transition from the old way of life to the new. He’d mocked the crude coins the Chernagors began to mint a generation after the fall of Argithea. Next to those of Avornis, they are ugly and irregular, he’d written. But new coins of Avornis come seldom if at all, while so many old ones are hoarded against hard times. Even these ugly things may be better than none.

  Later, he’d noted the demise of Avornan in the market square. Besides me, only a few old grannies use it as a birthspeech nowadays, he said. Some of the younger folk can speak it after a fashion, but they prefer the conquerors’ barbarous jargon. Soon, only those who need Avornan in trade will know it at all.

  Once, earlier, some of the Avornans left in the city had plotted to rejoin it to the kingdom from which it had been torn. The Chernagors discovered the plot and bloodily put it down. But none of them so much as looked toward me, Xenops wrote. Had they done so, they might have been surprised. I have been for so long invisible to the new lords of this town, though, that they cannot see me at all. Well, I know their deeds, regardless of whether they know mine.

  That was interesting, to say the least. How deep in the conspiracy had Xenops been? Had he quietly started it and managed to survive unnoticed when it fell to pieces? The only evidence Lanius had—the only evidence he would ever have—lay before him now, and the priest did not go into detail. If someone had found and read his chronicle while he still lived in Durdevatz, he had said enough to hang himself, so why not more? Lanius knew he would never find out.

  A chilling passage began, He calls himself a spark from the Fallen Star. Xenops went on to record, how an emissary from the Banished One had come to Durdevatz even that long ago. He’d made a mistake—he’d gotten angry when the Chernagors didn’t fall down on their knees before him right away. I advised the lords of the Chernagors that such a one was not to be trusted, as he had shown by his own speech and deeds, Xenops wrote. They were persuaded, and sent him away unsuccessful.

  How much did Avornis owe to this altogether unknown priest? If the Chernagors had fallen under the sway of the Banished One centuries earlier, how would the other city-states—how would Avornis—have fared? Not well, not when Avornis might have been trapped between the Banished One’s backers to north and south.

  “Thank you, Xenops,” Lanius murmured. “You’ll get your due centuries later than you should have, but you’ll have it.” He could think of, several passages in How to Be a King he would need to revise.

  At the end of the long roll of parchment, Xenops wrote, Now, as I say, I am old. I have heard that the old always remember the time of their youth as the sweet summer of the world. I dare say it is true. But who could blame me for having that feeling myself? Before the barbarians came, Argithea was part of a wider world. Now it is alone, and I rarely hear what passes beyond its walls. The Chernagors do not even keep its name, but use some vile appellation of their own. Their speech drives out Avornan; even I have had to acquire it, however reluctantly I cough out its gutturals. The tongue I learned in my cradle gutters toward extinction. When I am gone—which will not be long—who here will know, much less care, what I have set down in this scroll? No one, I fear me—no one at all. If the gods be kind, let it pass through time until it comes into the hands of someone who will care for it in the reading as I have in the writing. King Olor, Queen Quelea, grant this your servant’s final prayer.

  Tears stung Lanius’ eyes. “The gods heard you,” he whispered, though Xenops, of course, could not hear him. But how many centuries had Olor and Quelea taken to deliver the priest’s manuscript into the hands of someone who could appreciate it as it deserved? If they were going to answer Xenops’ last request, couldn’t they have done it sooner? Evidently not.

  Was a prayer answered centuries after it was made truly answered at all? In one sense, Lanius supposed so. But the way the gods had chosen to respond did poor Xenops no good at all.

  Lanius looked again at the long-dead priest’s closing words. No, Xenops hadn’t expected anyone in his lifetime could make sense of what he’d written. He’d merely hoped someone would someday. On reflection, the gods had given him what he’d asked for. Even so, Lanius would have been surprised if Xenops had thought his chronicle would have to wait so very long to find an audience.

  But then, for all Xenops knew, the scroll might have stayed unread until time had its way with it. The priest must have thought that likely, as a matter of fact, for Avornan was a dying language in the town that had become Durdevatz. And, except among traders who used it for dealing with the Avornans farther south but not among themselves, it had died there. Yes, its getting here was a miracle, even if a slow one.

  “A slow miracle.” Lanius spoke the words aloud, liking the way they felt in his mouth. But the Banished One could also work what men called miracles when he intervened in the world’s affairs, and he didn’t wait centuries to do it. There were times when he waited, and wasted, not a moment.

  The gods had exiled him to the material world. In a way, that made it his. Could they really do much to counter his grip on things here? If they couldn’t, who could? Ordinary people? He had far more power than they did, as Lanius knew all too well. Yet somehow the Banished One had failed to sweep everything before him. Maybe that was a portent. Maybe it just meant the Banished One hadn’t triumphed yet. Time was on his side.

  But he still feared Lanius and Grus and Pterocles—and Alca as well, the king remembered. Lanius only wished he knew what he could do to deserve even more of the Banished One’s distrust.

  For a while, nothing occurred to him. Having the exiled god notice him at all was something of a compliment, even if one that he could often do without. Then Lanius nodded to himself. If he—or rather, if Avornis’ wizards—could begin liberating thralls in large numbers, the Banished One would surely pay heed.

  What would he do then? Lanius didn’t know. He couldn’t begin to guess. One thing he did know, though, was that he would dearly love to find out.

  Hisardzik sat at the end of a long spit of land jutting out into the Northern Sea. Besieging Nishevatz had been anything but easy. Besieging this Chernagor city-state would have been harder still, for the defenders
had to hold only a short length of wall against their foes. King Grus, a longtime naval officer, knew he could have made the Chernagors’ work more difficult with a fleet, but they had a fleet of their own. Their ships were tied up at quays beyond the reach of any catapult.

  Fortunately, however, it did not look as though it would come to fighting. Prince Lazutin, the lord of Hisardzik, not only spoke to Grus from the wall of his city, he came forth from a postern gate to meet the King of Avornis. Lazutin was in his midthirties, slim by Chernagor standards, with a sharp nose and clever, foxy features. He denied speaking Avornan, and brought along an interpreter. Grus suspected he knew more than he let on, for he listened with alert attention whenever any Avornan spoke around him.

  Grus did his best to sound severe, saying, “You fell into bad company, Your Highness, when you chose Vasilko’s side.”

  Lazutin spoke volubly in the Chernagor tongue after that was translated for him. The interpreter, a pudgy man named Sverki, said, “He says, Your Majesty, it was one of those things. It was political. It was not personal.”

  “Men who get killed die just as dead either way,” Grus said.

  “You have shown you are stronger than Vasilko,” Lazutin said. Sverki did such a good job of echoing his master’s inflections, Grus soon forgot he was there. Through him, the Prince of Hisardzik went on, “You have shown the gods in the heavens are stronger than the Banished One. This also is worth knowing.”

  Grus had an Avornan who understood the Chernagor speech listening to the conversation to make sure Sverki did not twist what Lazutin said or what Grus himself said to Lazutin. The king glanced over to him now. The Avornan nodded, which meant Lazutin really had spoken of the Banished One, and not of the Fallen Star. Grus took that for a good sign.