The Scepter's Return

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by Harry Turtledove


  He called for pen and ink and parchment. He had no doubt Grus could imagine everything that might go wrong, too. Now, though, now was not the time to dwell on such things. Congratulations, he wrote, and then, after a pause, Your Majesty. All Avornis is proud of what you have achieved, and hopes you may achieve more still. Is it time to begin what we discussed when you were here in the north this past winter?

  He sealed the letter and sent it off. He wanted it to get to Grus as fast as it possibly could. There was no room for jealousy, not about this.

  Realizing he shouldn’t be the only one in the palace who had such excellent news, he hurried toward the bedchamber to tell Sosia. On the way there, he came up to Ortalis and a captain of the guards. The officer’s mailshirt clinked as he bowed to Lanius. The king bowed back, more than a little absently. To Ortalis, he said, “Your father is besieging Yozgat down in the south.”

  “That’s very good to hear, Your Majesty,” the guard captain said.

  “Yes, very good.” But Ortalis sounded much less impressed than his soldierly companion. Looking down his nose at Lanius, he said, “Makes training a moncat pretty tame, doesn’t it?”

  He laughed uproariously. The guardsman looked as though he didn’t know whether to laugh, too, or to look embarrassed. He tried doing both at once; what came out was a distinctly uneasy chuckle.

  As for Lanius, he didn’t think he’d been so angry since Grus announced he was appropriating more than his share of the crown. The hand that wasn’t holding the letter from Grus now bunched into a fist. Instead of trying to wipe the smirk off Ortalis’ handsome face, though, Lanius stormed away. Ortalis laughed again. So did the guard captain, but he still sounded nervous.

  “Quelea’s mercy!” Sosia exclaimed when Lanius thundered into the bedchamber. “What happened to you? You look like you want to murder someone.” Without a word, he thrust Grus’ letter at her. Once she read it, she seemed more bewildered than ever. “But this is good news. Or am I missing something?”

  “No, it’s good news, all right.” Lanius’ growl made it seem anything but. He summed up what Ortalis had said, and the way Sosia’s brother looked and sounded while he said it.

  “Oh,” Sosia said once the bile had poured out of him. She shrugged helplessly. “You know what Ortalis is like. I’m sorry, but he is like that, and nobody can do anything about it. If you let him see he’s gotten your goat, he’s won.”

  She was right. Lanius knew as much. He passed off most of Ortalis’ gibes with a smile and a nod—if his brother-in-law didn’t see him angry, he had less incentive to sting again. “This was just too raw to ignore,” he muttered.

  “It shouldn’t have been.” Sosia was doing her best to seem quiet and reasonable, the role Lanius usually took for himself. She continued, “It’s not even so much that he was wrong, even if he was rude. Training that moncat doesn’t seem like much next to besieging Yozgat.”

  “Not you, too!” Lanius shouted. Sosia stared at him in astonishment complete and absolute. He was as furious as she’d been when she caught him with each new serving girl. She was usually the one who yelled and threw things. Now he looked around for the closest missile, and she was lucky he didn’t find one ready to hand.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked helplessly. “What did I say?”

  “You’re as bad as your brother!” Lanius roared. He didn’t calculate that to wound, but it did the job. He rushed out of the bedchamber and slammed the door behind him.

  Servants scattered like frightened little birds when they saw his face. If they hadn’t scattered, he would have walked over them or through them. Once he got to the archives, he stormed in as fiercely as he’d swarmed out of the royal bedchamber. He slammed that door behind him, too. The boom echoed through the vast hall.

  Once the echoes faded, he found himself in the midst of silence. Whatever waited outside couldn’t touch him here. He knew what he’d done for Avornis. Grus also knew what he’d done for Avornis, even if the other king sometimes needed reminding. If no one in the palace knew …

  It’s because you haven’t told anyone here, Lanius thought. He knew why he hadn’t, too. The less he said, the less other people knew, the better for the kingdom. The better for the kingdom, yes, but the harder for him. He’d just painfully run into that. Until he ran into it, he didn’t realize how hard it would be.

  Soldiers made great swarms of hurdles from brush and branches. They piled them out of fire-arrow range of the walls of Yozgat. Grus didn’t know if he was going to try to storm Korkut’s capital. If he did, he would need some way to cross the moat. Hurdles, he thought, gave his men the best chance.

  The Menteshe had already tried to run barges piled high with sacks of grain under the walls. The Avornans had captured some and burned others. A few had managed to unload their supplies.

  That wouldn’t happen anymore—or Grus hoped with all his heart it wouldn’t, anyhow. Now, along with the stone- and dart-throwers by the riverbank, he had boats on the river, too. They weren’t proper river galleys. They were what his men could capture and what his carpenters could knock together with the timber they found locally. They floated, and he could fill them with archers and spearmen. As far as he knew, the Menteshe didn’t have any river galleys in these parts, either. Up until now, why would they have needed them here?

  Korkut’s men seemed alert. They shot from the top of the wall. Every so often, one of their arrows would hit an Avornan. Grus’ artificers set up more and more catapults that bore on the walls. Every so often, one of their darts would pierce a Menteshe or one of their stones would smash a man or two flat. Neither side did the other much harm. Each reminded the other it was still in the fight and still serious about it.

  Grus’ engineers began digging to see if they could undermine Yozgat’s walls the way they had with Trabzun’s. They reported to him with long faces. “Won’t be easy, Your Majesty,” one of them said. “Soil’s pretty soft, and the water from the moat seeps on down. I don’t see how we can keep a tunnel dry.”

  He listened, he thanked them, and then he summoned Pterocles. After describing the problem, he asked, “What can you do about it?”

  The wizard frowned. “I’m not sure I have a spell strong enough to shore up the bottom of a moat. Even if I did, it wouldn’t be something I could keep the Menteshe from noticing. There are quiet magics and loud ones, if you know what I mean. That sort of thing couldn’t be louder if I yelled at the top of my lungs.”

  Grus grunted discontentedly. He’d asked for miracles from Pterocles, and he’d gotten a lot of them. No wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He asked, “Could you come up with something new?”

  “Maybe,” Pterocles said. “Do you want to send me back to the city of Avornis and let me do somewhere between six months and six years of research? By the time I’m done, I may have something worthwhile. I may, mind you—I can’t promise anything.”

  That was no again, a polite no, but no all the same. Grus liked it no better than he had before. “Do you think any of the other wizards with the army will give me a different answer?” he inquired.

  “Some of them may,” Pterocles answered. Grus brightened—until the sorcerer went on, “I don’t think they’ll be telling the truth if they do, though. But some people do like to let you think they can do more than they really can.”

  That was depressingly true. Grus had seen it more times than he could count. Just to check, he called in several other wizards and asked what they could do about the moat. Sure enough, one man promised everything but to drink it dry with a hollow reed. Grus asked him several pointed questions and found out he knew less than he pretended.

  Quailing, the wizard asked, “What are you going to do to me, Your Majesty?”

  “I ought to give you a good kick in the backside for wasting my time,” the king answered. “Go on, though—get out of here. I’ve seen that you can cure thralls. Stick to that. If you want to tell tales, tell them to your grandchildren when you have some.” Chast
ened, the wizard hurried away.

  Once he was gone, Grus called Hirundo and said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to do it the hard way.”

  “I didn’t really expect anything else, Your Majesty,” the general replied. “Did you?”

  “Well, I hoped for something better, anyhow.” Grus eyed Yozgat’s formidable defenses. “Breaking in won’t be easy.”

  “If it were easy, somebody would have done it a long time ago,” Hirundo said. “One way or another, we’ll come up with something.”

  As usual, Grus admired his optimism. Also as usual, the king had trouble matching it. But his own spirits rose when he got a letter from Lanius telling him Sosia was expecting another baby. Up there in the north, life went on. And one reason it went on was because of what he was doing down here. Even if he didn’t take the Scepter of Mercy, the Menteshe would be too busy on their own soil to trouble Avornis for a long time to come.

  Grus shook his head. That wasn’t the right way to look at things. He was giving himself a comfortable excuse for failing. He didn’t need that, and neither did the army. He hadn’t come all the way down to Yozgat to fail. One way or another, he and the army had come up with something, again and again and again. Once more? Why not? Maybe Hirundo had the right idea after all.

  But Grus also knew he hadn’t been exaggerating or sounding a note of gloom and doom. Breaking into Yozgat wouldn’t be easy. The city was well fortified, and the defenders seemed in good spirits—or maybe they just feared what the Banished One would do to them if they let the place fall. Either way, they weren’t going to throw down their bows and their spears and surrender, however much he wished they would. He would have to get them out and get his men in.

  “How?” he wondered aloud. He couldn’t go under the moat—that seemed all too clear. His soldiers couldn’t sprout wings and fly, either. He didn’t even waste his time and Pterocles’ asking about such impossibilities. That left storming the city, which wasn’t impossible in the same sense of the word as the other two choices, but which didn’t look very promising, either.

  Or we can starve the Menteshe out—if we can starve them out, Grus thought. He had no idea what his chances there were. He did know keeping his own army supplied would be none too easy. The nomads would do everything they could to disrupt grain shipments from the north. They would probably burn or trample as many nearby crops as they could, too.

  If it were easy, somebody would have done it a long time ago. Hirundo had grinned as he said that. Grus wasn’t grinning. Taking Yozgat wouldn’t be easy. He had to hope it wouldn’t be impossible. More than that—he had to find a way to make sure it wasn’t impossible.

  At the moment, he had no idea what that way was.

  Don’t you think you should have had a better plan before you came this far? he asked himself. The only answer he could come up with was, I didn’t expect Yozgat to be quite so tough. That was true, but didn’t seem good enough.

  Inside Yozgat stood the formidable princely palace that also served as a citadel. Even if the city itself fell, the citadel could hold out for … well, who could guess how long? And the Scepter of Mercy … was in the citadel, of course. Where else would it be?

  Grus shook his head. He’d come so far. He’d done so much. No King of Avornis since the Scepter was lost had even come close to what he’d done. Freeing so many thralls south of the Stura would complicate the nomads’ lives for years to come, if not for generations. And yet, if he had to go back to the city of Avornis without the Scepter, he would have failed. That was why he’d come.

  The Menteshe knew it, too. He could feel that. If he went home without the Scepter of Mercy, he would never see Yozgat again. He didn’t know why he was so sure, but he was. Now or never, he thought unhappily.

  Maybe this was what the Banished One wanted him to feel. Maybe the exiled god was trying to lure him into something foolish, something rash. Maybe—but he didn’t think so. Something on the wind told him that whatever would happen would happen soon.

  He looked down at the hair on his arms. A lot of it had gone gray while he was looking in some other direction. Gray or not, though, it prickled up as though lightning were in the air. It also thought something important was on the way. Before this campaigning season was over, Avornis would have an answer.

  A good answer? The right answer? For now, he had to hope so.

  Marinus smiled up at Lanius and reached out with pink, chubby hands. Not for the first time, the king jerked his head back from the baby in a hurry.

  Ortalis laughed at him, saying, “That’s why I trim my beard closer than you do—less to hang on to.”

  “My children don’t grab and yank anymore,” Lanius said, though he’d worn it long even when they did.

  “Ah, but you’re going to have another one.” Ortalis looked at him sidelong. “Marinus there got you back into bed with my sister.”

  “No,” Lanius said, though the answer to that was yes. He sent Ortalis a sidelong glance of his own. His was wary; for Ortalis to mention the succession even glancingly was out of the ordinary, and anything out of the ordinary was liable to be dangerous. Anything that had to do with Ortalis was also liable to be dangerous; he still steamed at how Grus’ legitimate son had wounded him not long before.

  Ortalis laughed again. Lanius would have preferred almost any other sound. The laugh tried to hide fear and mockery and scorn, and magnified them instead. “You or me?” Ortalis said. “Your son or my son?”

  There it was, out in the open, naked and bleeding. Lanius tried to make light of it. His laugh was—he hoped—easier than his brother-in-law’s. “I don’t know why we’re worrying about it,” he said. “Your father will have set it up to work the way he wants it to.”

  He should have hated that idea. He wanted to be his own man, or at least to have the illusion that he was his own man. But the notion that Grus was firmly in charge held attractions, reassurances, of its own. It made him think of how things might have been if his own father had lived longer.

  Slowly, Ortalis shook his head. Now he was the one who said, “No,” and he meant it with every fiber of his being. “No,” he repeated in a soft voice, but one no less certain for that. “My father is not going to run this. Once he’s gone, by the gods, he’s gone.”

  “What are we going to do about it, then?” Lanius asked. “I don’t want to go to war with you. Whenever the kingdom has a civil war, it loses no matter who wins.”

  “We’ll settle it, the two of us,” Ortalis answered. But he didn’t say how he thought they should settle it, or what sort of settlement it might be. Instead, he scooped up his baby son, who giggled. “My father won’t have anything to do with it. Not a thing, you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Lanius said, almost as though he were gentling a wild animal. He felt that way. Ortalis seemed to think it was more important that Grus not be involved in the succession than who ended up succeeding. That made no sense to Lanius, but plainly it did to his brother-in-law.

  “All right.” Ortalis breathed heavily, his nostrils flaring each time he inhaled. “That’s how it’s going to be. We’ll take care of things. He won’t.” He carried Marinus away.

  Lanius was glad to see him go. Sweat trickled down the king’s sides from his armpits. He hated confrontations. He didn’t do them well, and he didn’t relish fights or arguments of any kind. And this one …

  What he’d wanted to scream at Ortalis was, Not now! You thick-skulled dunderhead, not now! This isn’t the time for these things. Wait until we know what happens in the south, for better or for worse.

  Would Ortalis have listened if he’d shouted something like that? He didn’t think so. Ortalis was a master of timing—of bad timing, that is. He saw what he wanted and he grabbed for it. He didn’t think of anything past that. Sometimes I wish I didn’t, either, Lanius thought.

  He needed a while to realize Ortalis hadn’t threatened him. Ortalis hadn’t threatened Grus, either. He hadn’t sounded friendly, but how could
anyone sound friendly talking about the succession? All Grus’ legitimate son had said was that he and Lanius would have to settle things after Grus was dead. How could anyone disagree with that?

  When Lanius told Sosia what Ortalis said, her eyes lit up. She might have been Ortalis spotting a deer on the hunt. “Write that down and send it to my father,” she said. “Write it down just the way you told it to me. As soon as his orders get back here, Ortalis will end up in the Maze, and that will be that.”

  “Why?” Lanius said. “It really was harmless.”

  “If Ortalis is worrying about the succession, it’s not harmless.” Sosia spoke with great conviction. “A scorpion couldn’t be more dangerous. A snake couldn’t be. Write to my father. He’ll say the same thing.”

  But Lanius shook his head. “Not now. He has more important things to worry about.”

  “More important than this?” Sosia didn’t believe a word of it.

  “More important than this,” Lanius said firmly. “If the army is outside of Yozgat, that’s more important than anything.” He started to say that Ortalis could overthrow him and the siege would still be more important. He started to, but he didn’t.

  Sosia looked down her nose at him even as things were. She looked very much like her brother then, which she didn’t usually do. Lanius hated the thought, which didn’t make it any less true. Now Sosia was the one who started to say something but didn’t. He knew what it would have been—something rude about Pouncer. Ortalis would have said it. He had said it. Still, not hearing it but watching her think it hurt almost as much as her shouting it would have.

  Lanius made himself shrug. He knew what he’d done. And he knew what he’d written to Grus. Now all he had to do was wait for the other king’s reply—and hope it was the one he wanted to hear.

  For once, Grus looked to the east, not the south. The walls of Yozgat dominated the horizon, all the more so when silhouetted against the lightening predawn sky. Everything seemed quiet on the walls. Grus had done everything he could to keep the Menteshe and the Banished One from learning when he would order an assault. He hadn’t known himself. Every night before going to bed, he’d tossed two coins. On the night he first got two heads … That had been last night. He’d left his pavilion then, told Hirundo, “Tomorrow,” and gone back to get what sleep he could.

 

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