The Bastard King tsom-1

by Dan Chernenko

“I do understand that it’s important, Your Excellency,” Grus said. “I’m doing the best I can for you.”

  “It isn’t good enough,” Corax snarled.

  “Tell me, Your Excellency, are you by any chance related to Count Corvus?” Grus asked.

  Corax blinked. “He’s my brother. Why do you ask? Do you know him? I don’t recall hearing that he knows you.” Suspicion filled his voice.

  “We met once, a long time ago,” Grus said. “And I’ve heard a lot about him.” None of what he’d heard was good. And Corax sounded as hard and unpleasant as his brother.

  One thing Corax couldn’t do was take a hint. “I should hope you’ve heard about him,” he said. “All of Avornis should know about us.” The Otter’s bow dipped. He grabbed for the rail.

  “I’m sure all of Avornis will.” Grus didn’t mean it as a compliment, but Corax didn’t need to know that.

  Nicator asked, “What about the Heruls?”

  “What business of yours are they?” The nobleman looked down his nose at the river-galley officer.

  “Well, if I’m going to fight me a war, I’d sort of like to know how big a war I’m fighting,” Nicator answered. “If the Heruls will pitch into Thervingia, King Dagipert can’t hit us near as hard as he can if they sit on their hands.”

  Corax weighed a sardonic reply. Grus reluctantly gave him credit for deciding against it. The envoy did say, “You need to worry less than you may have thought you did.”

  “Oh, I always worry,” Nicator said. “But you’re right—the thing is, how much?”

  Grus always worried, too. He was more imaginative than Nicator, and so found more things to worry about. A kingdom full of bad-tempered, haughty nobles like Corax and Corvus came to mind. They could do whatever they pleased, especially when the King of Avornis was weak. How many men, all through the realm, were busy lining their pockets because nobody was keeping an eye on them? The answer was, too many.

  When he let Corax off the Otter at the town of Veteres the next day, the noble started screaming at the people there to get him a horse and get out of his way. Grus looked at Nicator. “You see?” he said. “He’s like that with everybody.”

  Even before Count Corax galloped off to the northwest, Grus had the Otter heading back out toward midstream to resume his patrol. He took war patrol duties seriously. And he needed to. That very afternoon, another horseman came galloping down to the riverbank. This fellow had a bloody bandage on one arm and an arrow sticking out of the saddle behind him. “The Thervings!” he cried. “The Thervings are over the border!”

  “Really?” Grus murmured. “I never would have guessed.”

  King Lanius hadn’t known what to expect from life in the field. It was, he realized, much less of a hardship for him than for the Avornan soldiers. His tent could have held a couple of squads of them. He didn’t suppose they got the same food he aid, either.

  On the other hand, none of them had a tutor accompanying him to war. Lanius wouldn’t have minded, or didn’t think he would have minded, trading books for a sword. But the tutor wasn’t so harsh a taskmaster as usual. He kept looking around, eyes wide and frightened. At last, Lanius asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong now, Your Majesty,” the man answered. “But many more things can go wrong here than they can back at the royal palace.”

  For a while, Lanius enjoyed looking at the countryside. He rarely left the palace, and up till now he’d never gone outside the city of Avornis. But after a few days, the landscape began to pall. It was, after all, just a landscape—little villages and farmhouses and fields and meadows, some with sheep or cattle or horses in them, and groves and patches of forest and streams and ponds and, rising in the distance, the Bantian Mountains. Lanius began to wish he were home, especially as the terrain grew more rugged and the going slowed.

  He made the mistake of saying as much to his mother. “Shall I send you back to the city, then?” Queen Certhia asked eagerly.

  He shook his head. “No, thank you. I still want to see what happens.”

  “People kill each other,” Certhia said. “Do you think you’ll learn something, watching all the different ways they can die?”

  “Yes, Mother, I do,” he answered. Certhia gave him an annoyed look and waved him out of her pavilion, which was even larger and fancier than his.

  The rough country from which Avornis’ famous Nine Rivers sprang was interesting, but only for a little while. As the flat-lands had, hills and gorse and heather and bushes for which he had no names soon lost their appeal. Then a rider came galloping out of the southeast as though he had demons on his tail. He shouted for Queen Certhia and for Lepturus, and closeted himself away with them when they met him.

  Again, Lanius’ mother wouldn’t tell him what was going on. Again, the commander of the royal bodyguards proved more willing to talk. “That’s Count Corax who just came into camp,” he said when he emerged. “He’s back from a trip to the other side of the mountains. Bet you can’t guess why.”

  “To incite the Heruls against the Thervings?” Lanius asked.

  Lepturus jerked in surprise. “Well, I guess I should have known better than to say something like that to you, Your Majesty. Still, if you don’t mind my asking, how did you know?”

  “It’s the kind of thing Avornis does, whenever we have someone who thinks of it,” Lanius answered. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s what I’ve read, anyhow.”

  “Oh,” Lepturus said, and then, “Me, I don’t have a whole lot of book learning.”

  “It’s all I have,” Lanius said. “How could I have anything else, when I’ve never been out of the city of Avornis before?”

  “Now that you are out, what do you think of the countryside?” the guards commander asked.

  “Not much,” Lanius answered. “I like the royal palace a lot better.”

  Lepturus threw back his head and laughed. “Well, you’re honest about it, anyway.”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” Lanius asked.

  “No reason, Your Majesty. No reason at—” Before Lepturus could finish, horns blared and men started shouting his name. He hurried out of the royal pavilion. Over his shoulder, he said, “Sorry to go like this, but sounds like somebody just dropped a pot. I get to pick up the pieces.” The tent flap fell behind him. He was gone.

  With his mother still talking things over with Count Corax, there was no one to tell Lanius he couldn’t step outside his pavilion and see what was going on. Horsemen and foot soldiers hurried north and west in a steady stream. The guards by his tent, though, didn’t leave. If they had, it would have been treason. Lanius asked one of them, “Where are all the soldiers going?”

  “Off to fight, Your Majesty. Off to fight,” the guardsman answered.

  “Are the Thervings over there, then?”

  “That’s right,” the fellow said. “But we’ll lick ’em. You can count on that.”

  Lanius didn’t just want to count on it. He wanted to see it for himself. If he hadn’t come here to see a battle, what was the point to this long, dull, uncomfortable journey? He pointed in the direction the soldiers were going. “Fetch my pony,” he told the guards. “I’m heading that way myself.”

  Queen Certhia would have said no. (Actually, Lanius was sure his mother would have had hysterics before saying no.) Lepturus would have said no, too. But Certhia was busy with Corax, and Lepturus was busy with the army. That left it up to the bodyguards. They were young men themselves. When they grinned at one another, Lanius knew he had a chance. When one of them hurried off to get the pony, he knew he’d won his gamble.

  He was on the pony’s back and riding in the direction everyone else was going in less time than it takes to tell about it. The guardsmen clustered round him. They hadn’t forgotten their duty, even if they’d interpreted it in a way that would have made his mother blanch.

  “The king! The king! Look, it’s the king! He’s come to fight along with us!” Soldiers stared at Laniu
s and pointed his way. Then they began to cheer. The cheers spread through the whole army, getting louder and deeper as they did.

  By then, Lanius was only a little way behind the battle line that was taking shape on what looked to have been a field of barley. “I think this here’s just about far enough,” one of his bodyguards said. The others nodded. It was high ground. Beyond the Avornan soldiers, Lanius watched another line of battle forming. The sun glinted from the Thervings’ helmets and spear-points. Their horn signals, thin in the distance, sounded not much different from those Avornan trumpeters used.

  “What are you doing here?” someone behind Lanius demanded: Lepturus.

  “That’s, ‘What are you doing here, Your Majesty?’ ” Lanius replied in his haughtiest tones.

  Those tones didn’t work. “Don’t get smart with me, sonny, or you’ll find you’re not too big to get your bottom warmed,” Lepturus said. “Now answer me—what are you doing here?”

  “I came to see the battle,” Lanius said, much more quietly.

  The guard commander’s gaze raked the men who’d let Lanius come so far from the pavilion. They all looked as though they wished they could disappear. “I’ll deal with you later,”

  Lepturus said, and they looked unhappier yet. Lepturus turned back to King Lanius. “This isn’t a game, Your Majesty. The men who die will stay dead when it’s over. The men who hurt will go on hurting. The same goes for the horses. It’s worse for them, I think—they have no idea why these things happen to them, and all the loot they can hope for is a few mouthfuls of grass.”

  “I understand that,” Lanius said, though he wasn’t sure he did. “I want to see it.”

  As he had back at the pavilion, Lepturus got interrupted, this time by roars first from the Thervings and then from the Avornans. The two armies started moving toward each other. Lepturus looked very unhappy indeed. “Well, you’re going to get your wish, Your Majesty, on account of I haven’t got time to deal with you right now. But I’ll tell you something—if you get killed, I’m going to be very annoyed at you.” He hurried away, leaving Lanius to chew on that.

  “Don’t you worry none, Your Majesty,” said one of the guardsmen who’d brought him forward. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. We’ll make sure of that.”

  His comrades nodded. Lanius wondered what would happen to a bodyguard who let something happen to him. Nothing pretty, he suspected.

  Less than a quarter of a mile ahead, the Avornan army collided with King Dagipert’s Thervings. Lanius hadn’t expected the noise to be so dreadful. It sounded as though a hundred palace servants had dropped trays full of bowls and goblets and all started screaming about it at once. But it didn’t end in a matter of moments, as dropped trays would have done. It went on and on and on.

  An Avornan came staggering back out of the fighting. Blood splashed his coat of mail and his breeches. More blood dribbled out through his left hand, which was clenched around his right. In eerily conversational tones, he said, “Two fingers gone. Just like that, two fingers gone.”

  Lanius gulped. His belly churned. He’d come out to see the Avornan army triumph. Watching a mutilated man, standing close enough to smell the hot, metallic odor of the blood the fellow was losing, wasn’t what he’d had in mind. I will not be sick, he told himself sternly. By Olor’s beard, I won’t. One of his guards pointed toward the surgeons. The wounded soldier stumbled away. He still sounded as though he couldn’t believe what had happened to him. Lanius wished he couldn’t believe it, either.

  The fighting came closer. The Thervings were pushing the royal army back. An arrow thudded into the ground about twenty feet in front of Lanius. A guard said, “Beg your pardon, Your Majesty, but if them bastards—uh, beg your pardon again—get any nearer, we’re going to have to move you back.”

  “All right,” Lanius said, and all the guards looked relieved. He didn’t want to fall into Dagipert’s hands. The idea of marrying Romilda terrified him. He was much more afraid of that than of getting hurt or killed. Death wasn’t real to him. Injury hadn’t been—not till he saw the man with the ruined hand. But having to spend the rest of his life with a girl —if that wasn’t horror, he didn’t know what was.

  More bloodied Avornans came back past him, some under their own power, others helped by friends. A few of them, seeing who he was, saluted or called out his name. Most, lost in a private wilderness of pain, paid him no attention.

  Lightning struck from a clear sky, right in the middle of the Thervings’ line. The thunderclap staggered Lanius. Lurid purple afterimages danced in front of his eyes when he blinked. A guardsman said, “Oh, good! Our wizards aren’t asleep after all.”

  Another bolt struck, and another. The Thervings staggered back. The Avornans surged forward after them. “King Lanius!” they shouted. “King Lanius and victory!”

  “How’s that, Your Majesty?” a bodyguard asked.

  It was heady, sure enough. Queen Certhia kept an eye on what Lanius ate and drank, but every once in a while he got enough wine to feel a little drunk. This reminded him of that, but even better. Still, he couldn’t help asking a question of his own. “What will the Thervings’ wizards do?”

  He didn’t have to wait long to find out. Flames shot up from the ground. As Lanius had heard soldiers calling out his name, so he also heard them scream as the fire engulfed them. To his relief, they didn’t scream long.

  “That’s a foul magic,” one of the guardsmen said. “If lightning hits you, you’re gone, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But fire? Fire makes you suffer.”

  All at once, the flames died. Another bodyguard said, “Our wizards are awake today.” Still shouting Lanius’ name, Avornan soldiers forced their way forward again.

  The Thervings fought stubbornly. From everything Lanius had read about them, they usually did. No matter how stubbornly they fought, they had to give ground. At last, with the sun halfway down the sky in the west, they withdrew from the field. A fierce rear guard kept the Avornans from turning a victory into a rout.

  But it was a victory. Soldiers gathered around King Lanius, cheering till they were hoarse. Lepturus came up and asked him, “What do you think of that? Plenty of grown men, they’d give their left nut to have people shout for ’em this way.”

  Lanius beckoned to the commander of his bodyguards. Lepturus obediently leaned close. In a low voice, Lanius said, “I think I’d sooner be back at the palace.”

  Lepturus laughed. “Well, Your Majesty, can’t say I’m too surprised. But we won, so it was worthwhile.”

  Ravens and vultures had already started squabbling over the corpses lying on the field. Wounded men’s groans rose into the air. Dejected Therving prisoners, hands bound, stood under guard. Relatives might ransom a few nobles. The others faced hard labor the rest of their lives. “Was it?” Lanius asked.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Lepturus answered. “Bad as this is, it’d be four times worse if we’d done our best and the Thervings licked us anyway.”

  After some thought, Lanius sighed. “Maybe,” he said, and then, “What did Count Corax tell my mother? Will the Heruls bother King Dagipert, too?”

  “I think so.” Lepturus looked up. “But here she comes. You can ask her yourself.”

  Queen Certhia didn’t give Lanius the chance. She came up to him and hugged him. Under cover of that hug, she whispered, “You don’t know how foolish you were, or how much danger you were in there.”

  “It worked out all right, Mother,” Lanius answered. “We won.”

  “You didn’t know we were going to,” his mother said. “You should never have come on this campaign in the first place.”

  “But I did,” Lanius said. “I did, and we won.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Oars rose and fell in smooth unison as the Otter fought her way upstream on the Tuola. Commodore Grus had several lookouts posted. A few Therving raiders had crossed the river under cover of darkness. Now, hunted by Avornan soldiers, their main army turned
back two weeks earlier, they were desperate to escape.

  “Been a while since we won a battle against Dagipert,” Grus remarked.

  “So it has,” Nicator agreed. “I wonder how long it’ll be till we win another one, too.”

  “Who knows?” Grus said. “Maybe he’ll be so surprised we won this one, he’ll keel over and die of shock.”

  “Too much to hope for,” Nicator said. “When have you known a Therving to be so considerate to his neighbors?”

  “Funny,” Grus said. “A year ago, Dagipert must have thought he was on top of the world. He was sitting right outside the city of Avornis with his whole army. Arch-Hallow Bucco’d just pledged King Lanius to his daughter. He would’ve been the King of Avornis’ father-in-law, and grandfather to Lanius’ heir. Now—” He snapped his fingers. “That’s all he’s got left.”

  “Don’t count him out,” Nicator answered. “Like I say, when’s the last time you saw a Therving make things easy for Avornis?”

  Grus had no good reply to that. Even had he had one, he wouldn’t have gotten to use it. The Otter rounded a bend in the river, and two lookouts started yelling at the same time. “Thervings!” one shouted. “Dead ahead!” the other one added.

  There they were, only a couple of hundred yards in front of the river galley, more than a dozen men crammed into a rowboat that should have held half as many. They saw the Otter, too— saw it and knew how much trouble they were in. Their cries of dismay came clearly across the water. They tried to row harder, to get across the Tuola before the Otter could reach them. They weren’t rivermen by training; all they succeeded in doing was fouling one another. A couple of them drew bows and started shooting at the Otter, a gesture both brave and futile.

  “Up the stroke!” Grus commanded. The professionals aboard the river galley followed the rhythm the drummer beat out. The Otter seemed to leap ahead. Grus hurried to the stern and seized the rudder from the steersman. He wanted to make the kill himself.

  As though aiming an arrow at a running stag, he pointed the Otter’s bow at the place where the rowboat would be when the river galley met it. An arrow, once shot, was gone. Here, he could and did correct his aim all the way up to the instant of impact.