The Bastard King tsom-1

by Dan Chernenko

  “How good are the paintings?” Hirundo asked. “That will tell you something.”

  “Good question.” Grus looked down to the letter. “From what it says here, they’re quite good. Who would have thought it?” He wondered if he ought to order Petrosus to cut back on Lanius’ allocation again. After some thought, he decided against it. It would be mean-spirited. If Lanius wanted to supplement what the treasury gave him—and if he’d found a way to do it—he could.

  Somewhere off in the distance, a wolf howled. Grus hoped it was a wolf, anyhow. For all he knew, it might have been a Menteshe signal. Or, as Hirundo put it, “There go Evren’s men, baying at the moon again.”

  “If they’re sensible, they won’t come north over the Stura for quite a while after this,” Grus said. “But who knows if they’re sensible?”

  “Who knows what the Banished One will have them do?” Hirundo said.

  Grus sighed. “Yes, there’s that, too, of course. They don’t always do what they want to do. They do what he wants them to do, or what suits his purposes.” He wondered what Alca could have learned about freeing thralls from the dark spells that clouded their lives if Evren’s invasion hadn’t made her turn her attention to helping protect the kingdom. He wouldn’t know for some time, if he ever did.

  Hirundo’s smile showed sharp teeth. “I hope his purposes include getting lots of them killed, because that’s what’s happening to them.”

  “I know,” Grus said. “And I don’t see how Evren can help knowing, too. What I wonder is why he keeps fighting for the Banished One—why all the Menteshe princes keep fighting for him—when that only brings trouble down on their heads.”

  With a laugh, Hirundo answered, “Well, if they didn’t line up with the Banished One, they’d have to line up with us instead, and they probably think that’s worse.”

  He might have been joking. No, he was joking. Even so, Grus thought he’d hit on an important truth. Like any men, the Menteshe assumed their enemies were wicked just because they were enemies. “They’re going to hate us,” he said, “but let’s make sure they’re afraid of us, too. We need to give them something to howl about.”

  They got their chance the next morning. Scouts came galloping in, reporting a large band of Menteshe not far away. At Grus’ shouted orders, horns blared in the Avornan camp. Whooping men flung themselves into the saddle. Before throwing them at the foe, though, Grus sent out more scouts in all directions.

  “That’s good,” Hirundo said. “That’s very good. We don’t want any nasty surprises.”

  “We certainly don’t,” Grus agreed. “Count Corvus was a first-class bastard, but he taught me a good lesson there. If he’d paid attention to what he was doing against the Thervings, odds are he’d be King of Avornis today.”

  “Good thing he didn’t, then,” Hirundo said, which made Grus grin.

  He grinned again a few minutes later, when a scout came back with news that the Menteshe had hidden a couple of hundred horsemen in an almond grove not far from the plain where most of them camped. “Did they see you?” Grus asked.

  “I don’t think so, Your Majesty,” the scout answered.

  “All right,” Grus said. “We’ll go on with the attack on their main body, just as though we didn’t have the slightest idea that outflanking party was around. But when they come out of the trees to give us a surprise, we’ll give them one instead. Hirundo!”

  “Yes, Your Majesty?” the general said.

  “See that our men on that flank know Evren’s riders are going to burst out and try to throw them into disorder. I want to make sure that doesn’t happen. But I also want to make sure we don’t make things too obvious over there. Do you understand me?”

  “I think so.” Hirundo said. “You want them to try to bring off their ambush, and you want to smash them when they do.”

  “That’s it exactly.” King Grus slapped him on the back. “Now let’s go see if we’re as smart as we think we are.”

  Grus was starting to feel a little more comfortable on horseback, which he found alarming—it proved he was spending too much time in the saddle. He scarcely noticed the weight of chain mail anymore. As long as he rode a horse that wasn’t too spirited—this one was the gelding he’d used while fighting the rebellious baron, Pandion—he did reasonably well.

  His men shouted when the Menteshe came into sight. The nomads shouted, too. They were already in a loose line of battle; they must have spotted the dust the Avornan cavalry kicked up. The Menteshe started shooting before the Avornans came close enough for their bows to bite. And then, instead of rushing forward to mix it up with swords, Evren’s men rode away, shooting over their shoulders as they went.

  That struck Grus as unfair and unsporting. Ineffective? He wished it were. Avornans tumbled out of the saddle one after another. Hardly any Menteshe went down. The nomads weren’t doing enough damage to make Grus worry about his army, but they weren’t taking any damage at all.

  And then, with wild whoops and shouts, the Menteshe who’d hidden in the almond grove burst from cover and thundered after the Avornans. At the same time, the nomads ahead stopped retreating before their foes and charged at them, also shouting in their hissing, incomprehensible language.

  If the Avornan scout hadn’t spotted the Menteshe lurking in the grove, it might have gone hard for Grus and his men. As things were, Grus shouted, “Forward! Now we have the chance to close with them!” and spurred toward the Menteshe in front of him. He trusted—he bet his life—that the riders at the Avornan left flank and rear would keep the ambushers from throwing his men into chaos.

  He knew he would never make a mounted archer. All he could do was draw his sword and wait for the two lines to smash together—if they did; if the Menteshe didn’t turn and flee once more.

  Evren’s men didn’t. The nomads in front must have been sure the ambush party from the grove would do its job. By the time they realized the Avornans were neither panic-stricken nor beaten, it was too late for them to break off. Grus and his followers were right on top of them.

  “For King Olor and Queen Quelea!” Grus yelled, slashing at a nomad. At closer quarters, the Avornans had the advantage. Their horses were bigger than Menteshe ponies, their chain mail better protection than the treated leather with which Evren’s men armored themselves. Now Grus’ men, also shouting the names of their gods, hacked Menteshe out of the saddle and took revenge for the long-range punishment their enemies had given them.

  A nomad cut at Grus’ head. The stroke missed, the Menteshe’s blade hissing past less than a hand’s breadth in front of Grus’ face. The king slashed back. The nomad turned the blow. Sparks flew as his blade and Grus’ grated against each other. Before the Menteshe could strike again, another Avornan laid his cheek open with a backhand cut. He howled and sprayed blood and clutched at himself, all else forgotten in his pain. Grus’ next stroke made him slide off his horse into the dust.

  Grus risked a look back over his shoulder. His men had turned on the warriors who’d burst from the almond grove. He breathed a little easier, seeing that the nomads weren’t going to do to him what the Thervings had done to Count Corvus.

  All at once, the Menteshe decided they’d had as much of this fight as they wanted. When they galloped off this time, the flight was real, not feigned. One proof the Menteshe truly were running was that they loosed far fewer over-the-shoulder shots at their foes than they had before.

  A long pursuit was hopeless. Grus looked around for a trumpeter and, for a wonder, found one. At his order, the fellow blew Rein in. Watching the Menteshe run away was one of the most satisfying things an Avornan army could do.

  General Hirundo rode up to Grus. “Well, Your Majesty, they’re paying for everything they’re getting on this side of the river,” he said.

  “That’s true.” But Grus had to point out the other side of the coin, as he had before. “They’re making us pay, too.”

  “I know,” Hirundo said. “But we can afford it longe
r than they can.”

  “Can we? I wonder,” Grus said. “This farmland they’ve ravaged will take years to get back to what it should be. The same for the lands the Thervings plundered again and again. We have to eat, you know. And without farmers to make soldiers and pay taxes, what are we? In trouble, that’s what.”

  Hirundo pointed at him. “So that’s why you’ve made such a fuss about nobles who take over small farmers’ lands.”

  “Of course,” Grus said, only to realize it wasn’t of course to Hirundo. “Either I’m King of Avornis, or all these barons and counts get to set up as petty kings inside the kingdom. I don’t intend to let that happen.” He looked south, toward the cloud of dust that veiled the Menteshe from sight. “I don’t intend to let those savages—or their master—ruin Avornis, either.”

  “You can stop the nomads, especially if you fight as smart a battle as you did here,” Hirundo said. “But how do you propose to stop the Banished One?”

  Grus started to answer. He stopped without saying a word, though, for he realized he hadn’t the least idea.

  King Lanius nodded to the green-robed priest who worked out of a tiny room stuck in a back corner of the arch-hallow’s residence. Ixoreus had no ecclesiastical rank to speak of. His white beard said he never would, and that he didn’t care. Lanius felt more at home with him than with most people, though. The two of them shared a restless, relentless urge to know.

  The arch-hallow’s secretary returned the nod with the air of one equal replying to another. “So you want to go into the archives, do you?” he said.

  “That’s right.” Lanius nodded. “I’m interested in finding out how our prayers and services have changed since earliest times.”

  Ixoreus blinked at him. Most old men had trouble reading, while they could still see things clearly at a distance. By the way Ixoreus leaned forward, he had trouble with making out things farther away from him—a lucky infirmity in a man who’d devoted his life to books. “Yes, that could be interesting, couldn’t it?” he said.

  “I think so.” Lanius didn’t say he was trying to learn what sort of god the Banished One had been before his banishment. He had the feeling that the less he said about the Banished One, the better off he—and Avornis—would be.

  “Let’s see what we can do, then,” Ixoreus said, slowly getting to his feet. His back was stooped; he leaned on a stick. His walk was a shuffle a tortoise might have outsped. Lanius followed without a word, without even a thought, of complaint. The priest, after all, was taking him where he wanted to go. He would have accompanied a willing, pretty girl with hardly more eagerness.

  Not far from the altar in the great cathedral was a stairway Lanius had noticed before but never really thought about. He’d assumed it let priests come up more conveniently to attend the altar. And so, no doubt, it did, but that proved to be anything but its main purpose.

  Having gone down the stairs, Lanius gaped in wonder. “I never imagined this was here!” he exclaimed.

  “You don’t understand yet,” Ixoreus said, smiling. “This is only the first level.”

  “How many are there altogether?” Lanius asked.

  “Five,” the priest answered. “The cathedral’s a good deal bigger under the ground than it is on top.” He made his halting way toward the stairway down to the next level. As he began to descend, he said, “One of these days I’ll fall, and these stairs will be the death of me.” Lanius started to shake his head and disagree, but Ixoreus smiled again. “There are plenty of worse ways to go. By now, I’ve seen most of them.”

  The archives filled the two lowest levels. Lanius’ nostrils twitched at the half musty, half animal smell of old parchment. “No other odor like that in all the world,” he said.

  His words seemed to reach Ixoreus in a way nothing else had. “Well, none except ink, anyhow,” he said. He and Lanius eyed each other in perfect mutual understanding.

  Down on the bottommost level, only a few lamps burned. In that dim, flickering light, Lanius felt not only the weight of the centuries but also the weight of everything built and excavated above him. After a moment’s fear, he shrugged. If an earthquake made it all collapse, in less than the blink of an eye he would be a red smear thinner than any sheet of parchment. What point to worrying, then?

  “Do you want a guide, or would you sooner poke through things on your own?” Ixoreus asked.

  “By your leave, most holy sir—” Lanius began.

  The priest laughed out loud. “You want me to go away and let you do as you would,” he said. “There may be more to you as a searcher than I thought. The run-of-the-mill sort want me to hold their hand. They may find what they’re looking for, but somehow they’re never looking for anything much. The other kind—well, they often come up empty. When they don’t, though…”

  Lanius hardly heard him. The king looked now here, now there, wondering where to begin. He also wondered why he’d never come here before. True, the royal archives held enough documents to keep a man busy till the end of time. Even so, he should have started going through these records years before.

  When he sat down, the stool creaked under him. He wondered if it dated back to the days before the Scepter of Mercy was lost. Then he wondered if it dated back to the days before the Banished One was cast out of the heavens. Anywhere else, he would have laughed at the idea. Down here in the near darkness, it didn’t seem so ridiculous anymore.

  He almost called Ixoreus back to ask if the records held any order at all. In the end, he didn’t—he wanted to find out for himself. He soon discovered there wasn’t much. Documents from his father’s reign lay beside others dating back before the loss of the Scepter of Mercy. If he wanted something in particular, he was going to need luck and patience.

  Luck came from the gods. Patience… Lanius shifted on that ancient stool. Patience he had. His lips twisted in a bitter smile. After all, it wasn’t as though he would be taking time away from anything vital to Avornis if he came down here and worked his way through the clerical archives one silverfish-nibbled piece of parchment at a time. Grus didn’t let him deal with anything vital anyhow.

  If he hadn’t had practice reading old, old scripts in the royal archives, he would have been altogether at sea here. As things were, that troubled him no more than switching from the hand of one secretary to that of another would have. He felt like shouting when he came upon letters from half a dozen yellow-robed clerics bewailing the irruption of the Menteshe into the lands around their towns. No Avornan clerics had gone to those towns for more than four hundred years.

  He felt like cursing when, in the same set of pigeonholes as those letters, he found others about sending consecrated wine to the Chernagor city-states that came from the reign of his great-grandfather. Maybe someone would find those interesting one day, but he didn’t.

  He shoved them back into their pigeonholes. The next cache of letters also came from the days of his dynasty, which meant they were too recent to be interesting to him. He had to go through them one at a time anyway, because no one except Olor and Quelea could be sure ahead of time what might lie mixed in with them.

  As it happened, nothing was mixed in with that batch—nothing Lanius cared about, anyhow. “But if I hadn’t looked through them, the parchment I need would be at the bottom of that crate,” he muttered. His words vanished without the slightest trace of echo, as though the parchments and the boxes and racks that held them swallowed up sound. They were surely hungry. They wouldn’t have had many sounds to swallow down here, not for year upon year upon year.

  Lanius went through another crate and another rack. He kept waiting for Ixoreus to come nag him about going back up to the outer world again. But the green-robed priest left him alone.

  That made him happy. Ixoreus understood, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Lanius had met only a handful of men who did.

  And patience and persistence had their reward. Lanius was going through some minutes from a minor ecclesiastical council two hundred fifty ye
ars before when he came upon a parchment that didn’t belong with the rest. He saw as much at once; the parchment was yellow with age, the writing faded to a pale ghost of itself. He whistled softly. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anything this old in the royal archives.

  He brought three lamps together, to give him the best light he could get down here. Then he bent close to see what he could make out. Not just the script was archaic here; so was the language. He had to puzzle it out a phrase at a time. When he finished, he quietly put the parchment back where he’d found it. He said not a word about it to Ixoreus when they returned to the world of light and air. The priest wouldn’t have believed him. Lanius wondered if he believed himself, or wanted to.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  A lea eyed the Menteshe prisoner with no great warmth. The Menteshe looked back at her out of narrow dark eyes filled with fear and suspicion. Grus listened to the rain drumming down on the roof of his residence in Cumanus. His men and the changing weather had finally persuaded Prince Evren his attacks were costing him more than they were worth.

  “You speak Avornan?” Alca asked the prisoner.

  “I speak some, yes,” the nomad answered.

  “I chose one for you who did,” Grus said.

  Alca nodded. She asked the Menteshe, “What is your name?”

  “I am Kai-Qubad,” he said. If he’d trusted her, he would have given her his whole genealogy after that; the Menteshe were proud of their ancestors. Grus wondered why. To him, one lizard-eating savage was no different from another. Someone like Lanius, now, had reason to boast about the family tree. But a Menteshe? Kai-Qubad, though, fell silent after his own name, not wanting to give Alca more of a hold on him than he had to.

  She didn’t press him for more. Instead, she said, “You need to know that I will know if you lie. Do you understand this? Do you believe it?”