The Scepter's Return

by Harry Turtledove

  When Grus didn’t speak right away, Pterocles and Otus and Collurio all asked, “Well?” at the same time, and in identical anxious tones.

  That made Grus want to laugh again. He didn’t. This was a serious business, as no one knew better than he. “Very well, and I thank you,” he said. “I have met the Banished One, and he has no choice but to obey the Scepter of Mercy.” He held it up again. The jewel sparkled once more. Maybe that wasn’t the sun glancing off it. Maybe it really did have an inner fire, an inner life, of its own.

  They crowded around him then, exclaiming and congratulating him. So did the pavilion guards. Hirundo took the liberty of slapping him on the back. Grus didn’t mind at all. The general, a practical man, asked, “What did you squeeze out of him?”

  “First, he won’t help or incite any of our neighbors to war on us again,” Grus answered. Everyone who heard him cheered.

  He did wonder whether that pledge was good for all time. He wouldn’t have bet on it. If the Scepter was ever lost again, or maybe even if Avornis had a king who lacked the will or the strength or whatever it was that he needed to use the Scepter as he should … In that case, the exiled god might well stir up trouble once more. But Grus did dare hope that evil day, if it ever came, lay many years away.

  “You said first,” Pterocles remarked. “That should mean there’s a second, maybe even a third.” He waited expectantly.

  “There is—a second, anyway.” Grus nodded. “He will no longer make or back up spells of thralldom, or even the weaker sort of mind-dulling magic he used on the Menteshe this campaigning season.”

  This time, Otus and Fulca cried out louder than the rest. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. He enjoyed that liberty more than the one Hirundo had taken, and squeezed her for a moment before letting her go. He wondered if he could have gotten more from her, and wouldn’t have been surprised. A little regretfully, he put the idea aside. He’d enjoyed himself with a good many women, before and after he was married, but he’d never tried to sleep with a friend’s wife. He thought that record worth keeping.

  “Is there a third?” Pterocles asked.

  “Aren’t those two enough?” Hirundo said.

  “Those two are enough,” Grus said. “The Banished One … is what he is. I don’t think even the Scepter of Mercy can make him anything else. The only way he’ll ever change is by deciding he wants to or has to, if he ever does. If he hasn’t for this long, I don’t suppose he will any time soon.”

  He looked at the Scepter again. Did the fault lie in it, or in the Banished One, or in his own ignorance of how to use it? He didn’t know. Thanks to that ignorance, he couldn’t know, not now—maybe not ever. But he wouldn’t have been surprised if all three were involved.

  “What happens next?” Hirundo asked. “Are you going to go on with the siege of Yozgat? Or is the Scepter of Mercy enough?” He eyed it with something not far from awe of his own. After a moment, he resumed. “Heading for home might be better. The sooner we can get it back to Avornis, the less chance the Menteshe have of stealing it again.” After another pause, he added, “The choice is yours, Your Majesty. I know that. I was just—thinking out loud, you might say.”

  “I understand. I’ve been thinking about the same thing—only more quietly,” Grus said. Hirundo made a face at him. The king went on, “I think we will go back. I told Korkut he was welcome to this place if he gave up the Scepter, and I meant it.”

  “It’s all right with me,” Hirundo said. “I just hope the Banished One doesn’t whip the nomads into a fit to get it back, that’s all.”

  “He can’t. His Majesty made sure he couldn’t,” Pterocles pointed out. He also kept staring at the Scepter of Mercy. Some of his expression was awe like Hirundo’s; the Scepter naturally brought it out. But his face also showed intense curiosity. He wanted to know what all the Scepter could do and how it did it.

  That worried Grus for a moment, but only for a moment. He was sure of one thing—the Scepter would not let itself be used wrongly. If the Banished One hadn’t been able to do that, Pterocles wouldn’t be, either. Grus said, “We’ll need to be careful no matter what. The Menteshe will probably strike at us whether the Banished One whips them on or not. They really do worship him.”

  “I’ll do everything I can, Your Majesty,” Hirundo promised. “I suppose it’s possible they can beat the whole army. You can have my head, though, if they catch us by surprise.”

  If the Menteshe caught the Avornans by surprise, they would probably have Hirundo’s head, and Grus’, too. Grus didn’t point that out. Instead, he gestured with the Scepter. By the way everyone’s eyes, even his own, followed it, he couldn’t have found anything more effective to do. He said, “Let’s get ready to go home.”

  The soldiers wouldn’t be sorry to break off the siege. Most of them liked having campaigned much more than they liked campaigning. Since Grus felt the same way, he couldn’t get angry at them for that. And they would likely stay healthier on the move than settled down here. Fluxes of the bowels and other sicknesses cut short more sieges than enemy soldiers did.

  “When we first met—when you were a river-galley skipper and I ran a troop of horsemen—did you ever dream it would come to … this?” Hirundo asked.

  “No,” Grus answered. If he tried to say yes, Hirundo wouldn’t need the Scepter of Mercy to know he was lying. He pointed at the general. “How about you?”

  “Me? Back then, all I worried about was driving the Menteshe out of the kingdom. It seemed like plenty, too—plenty and then some.”

  “It did, didn’t it?” Grus agreed. Hirundo sketched a salute and went off to start readying the withdrawal from Yozgat.

  “Your Majesty?” Otus asked, and then paused. Only when Grus nodded did the former thrall go on, “Did you really mean that, Your Majesty? Thralldom is gone? All the thralls are themselves again?”

  “I … think so,” Grus answered cautiously. “When we go back, we’ll send out riders to villages where our wizards have never gone. We’ll find out for sure then. But that was the promise I got from the Banished One. I don’t believe he can break a promise he makes through the Scepter.”

  “This is good. This is gooder—better—than anything I can think of.” Otus looked at the Scepter, then toward the south. When his eyes swung back to the king, they had a twinkle in them. “I would kiss you, too, but I know you like it better from Fulca.”

  Grus laughed. “Well—yes,” he said, and Otus laughed with him. The world seemed fresh and new and wonderful. When was the last time he’d had that feeling? After his first girl, maybe. He shook his head. As far as he could see, this was even better than that, and he’d never imagined anything could be.

  What’s left for me to do? he wondered. In the short run, several things needed taking care of. He knew what they were. He intended to deal with them. But after that? Once he’d recovered the Scepter, wasn’t everything else an anticlimax? I’ll worry about it when I get back to the capital, he told himself. I’ve had plenty of worse things to worry about, by the gods.

  One of the things that needed taking care of now was a talk with Korkut. He approached the moat under flag of truce, but with enough shieldsmen and other guards to make sure the Menteshe couldn’t hope to break the truce and kill him. When he called for Korkut, one of the defenders who understood Avornan shouted back, asking him to wait. He waved to show that he would.

  The Menteshe prince came up onto the wall half an hour later. “What do you want?” he called in his fluent Avornan.

  “You know I have the Scepter,” Grus said.

  “I know it, ah, disappeared,” Korkut answered bleakly. “If you say you have it, I will not call you a liar, though you could show it to me.”

  “No,” said Grus, who’d left it in his pavilion under guard. Bringing it anywhere near the wall would have been all too likely to tempt the Menteshe to attack to get it back. “I have it. Believe me or not, as you like. The Scepter is what I came f
or. I told you that before. Since I have it, I’m going home. As far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to Yozgat. Your loving half brother may have a different idea about that, but the two of you are welcome to each other, too.”

  “You are—going home?” Korkut sounded as though he couldn’t believe his ears.

  “I said so from the beginning,” Grus answered. “If you’d handed me the Scepter then, we never would have had a siege to begin with. But you need to know I’m leaving because I want to, not because I have to. We’ve won every stand-up fight against the Menteshe. We can win one more—or three or four more—if we have to.”

  “Can you fight the Fallen Star, thief?” Korkut asked.

  “Yes,” Grus said bluntly. “I can, and I have, and if I need to I will again.” That made the Menteshe who understood Avornan stir on the wall, as he’d hoped it would. The rest would stir, too, once they’d translated it. Having said what he’d come to say, he went back inside the Avornan palisade. When he looked toward Yozgat again, Korkut was still up on the wall, staring out after him. Well, well. Grus smiled. Now he has something brand new to think about. Good.

  More waiting. Lanius had always thought he was a patient man. He’d had to be patient. He’d been shoved into the background several times in several different ways. Even if Pouncer had succeeded down in Yozgat, he would stay in the background. Grus would get the credit, and Grus would deserve … a good deal of it, for he would be the one who wielded the Scepter of Mercy.

  But he never would have had the chance to wield it if Lanius hadn’t had the idea to train Pouncer to steal it.

  Things had happened down in the far south. The dream the Banished One had sent made him sure of that. But he still wanted a human source for the news, a source he could pass on to others. Not having one yet made him itch worse than sitting in a bathtub full of fleas would have.

  He buried himself in the archives so he wouldn’t snap at whoever was unlucky enough to run into him. He expected that Grus and Collurio and Pterocles and Hirundo and Otus—maybe especially Otus—were rejoicing down there outside of Yozgat. He wanted to have a palpable excuse to rejoice himself. He wanted to run through the palace corridors whooping and waving his arms and kissing everybody he met—old men with brooms, serving girls (if Sosia didn’t like it, too bad—but he would kiss her, too), fat cooks, Chernagor ambassadors (not that any Chernagor ambassadors were around right now, but the longer he waited for a letter, the more chance they had to show up), his children. Ortalis? He had to think about that, but in the end he nodded. He’d even kiss Ortalis.

  But he couldn’t, not just on the strength of a dream. He needed something written down in a man’s hand. He ached for that—and he didn’t have it.

  As long as he didn’t, he buried himself in tax registers that would have stupefied him in ordinary times—and he didn’t stupefy easily. While he was concentrating on them, though, he wasn’t thinking about anything else.

  He learned that his great-great-great-grandfather was a thief and a cheapskate and a man any reasonable person would hate on sight. There were several uprisings in those days. Lanius’ ancestor put them down with ferocious brutality and then taxed the rebels even more to make them pay for the cost of suppressing them. The king thought that, if he’d been alive in his multiple-great-grandfather’s day, he would have wanted to revolt, too.

  And yet his own father—a stern, hard man himself—would have probably put down the uprisings about the same way. And Mergus was a pretty good king, as far as Lanius could judge. The more you looked at things, the less simple they got.

  One afternoon, someone knocked on the heavy doors that closed the archives off from the rest of the palace. Lanius jumped and swore. He’d trained the servants not to bother him in here unless it was the end of the world.

  Maybe it was.

  With that in mind, Lanius didn’t shout at the apprehensive servant waiting outside. “Yes? What is it?” he asked in his usual tone of voice.

  Relief blossomed on the man’s face. “Your Majesty, there’s a courier up from the south waiting to see you.”

  “Up from the south? From south of the Stura?” Lanius asked, and the servant nodded. “Well, you’d better take me to him, then,” the king said.

  The servant took him to the courier, who waited in an anteroom with a cup of wine and a chunk of brown bread. The man jumped to his feet and bowed. “Your Majesty, I was to give you this first,” he said, and handed Lanius a rather crumpled scrap of parchment.

  Lanius recognized Grus’ firm hand at once. Please don’t eat the man who carries this if he bothers you while you’re in the archives, the other king wrote. The news he carries will be worth the hearing. A flush rose all the way to the top of Lanius’ head. Grus knew him much too well.

  “All right. You’re eating here. You’re not being eaten,” Lanius said, and the courier managed a nervous smile. Lanius held out his hand. “Give me this news King Grus says you have.”

  His fingers trembled as he broke the seal on the letter the courier took from his tube. Now it would be official. Now the world could know. There was the other king’s script again. The moncat fetched it, Grus wrote without preamble. I have it. I’ve used it. It’s even more astonishing than we hoped it would be. I’m bringing it back to the city of Avornis. It belongs to the kingdom again. Lanius didn’t run and whoop after all. He knew too much joy for that. He just stood there, smiling while tears ran down his face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Before, whenever Grus found himself near the south bank of the Stura, the north bank had always seemed much farther away than the width of the river should have suggested. It was as though he were leaving a different world, one that hated him and did not want him to escape.

  He didn’t get that feeling now. Maybe it had always been his imagination, but he didn’t think so. He’d noted it too often for that.

  He turned to Hirundo, who rode beside him. “When we get back into Avornis proper with the Scepter of Mercy, all this will truly start to seem real,” he said.

  “It already does to me,” the general replied. “When the Menteshe didn’t come after us in swarms to try to take the Scepter back, that’s when I knew for sure you’d taken care of things.”

  “The Banished One couldn’t set them in motion against us. He couldn’t.” Grus repeated the word with amazement in his voice. “And there are no more thralls. None, not as far as I can tell.”

  “Doesn’t look that way,” Hirundo agreed. Thralls weren’t his chief worry. He cared much more about bad-tempered horsemen with double-curved bows. “The nomads raided us a few times, harried us a little—but that’s all.” He sounded amazed, too.

  Ferries moved back and forth across the Stura. “Do you know what we’re going to have to do one of these days? We’re going to have to bridge the river,” Grus said. Hirundo eyed him as though he’d gone mad. But there had been bridges over the Stura before the Menteshe came. Why not again?

  Hirundo had no trouble putting his objections into words, asking, “Do you really want to give the Menteshe a free road into the kingdom?”

  “If they’re their own men, if they’re not the Banished One’s cat’s-paws, why not?” Grus said. “I’d rather trade them than shoot arrows at them all the time.”

  “I’d like to do a lot of things,” Hirundo said. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to do them, or even that I ought to do them. The nomads are dangerous even as their own men.”

  Grus stared at him. Usually the king was the one with the calm, cool, gray good sense, and Hirundo the smiling optimist, always sure things would turn out for the best. Here they’d reversed roles. Hirundo had spent his whole career worrying about the Menteshe as enemies; he didn’t have an easy time changing the way he’d thought for so long. Grus could do it. But then, he had an advantage—he’d held the Scepter of Mercy in his hand.

  Instead of a bridge, a river galley waited to take them over the Stura to Cumanus. That seemed fitting. He’d starte
d his rise to the crown as captain of a river galley. Now he would bring the Scepter back to Avornis in one.

  He held the talisman as he boarded the galley, and savored the awe on the faces of officers and oarsmen. When he began to savor it perhaps too much, the Scepter seemed heavier, as though warning him that, while it deserved all the respect they gave it, he didn’t. He laughed. Humility evidently walked hand in hand with mercy. Well, fair enough.

  At the captain’s order, the oarmaster called the stroke. He used the tap of a drum to help the men at the bow hear the rhythm. It was all as familiar to Grus as a pair of old shoes. He could have given the commands himself. The skipper was a young man. Did he remember the days when Grus had walked the deck on a ship like this? Had he even heard of those days?

  And did this young skipper have the same kind of ambition as Grus had once known? Did he dream of wearing the crown himself one day? Whatever he dreamed of, it wouldn’t be as big as bringing the Scepter of Mercy back where it belonged. From now on, Kings of Avornis and those who longed to be kings would have to have smaller goals. The big one, the one that had eluded so many for so long, was finally done.

  The galley arrowed across the river. The wharves and piers of Cumanus drew ever closer. Then, very smoothly, the ship came up to a pier. A sailor tossed a line to a waiting longshoreman who made the bow fast to the pier. By the river galley’s stern, another burly longshoreman was doing the same.

  “We’re here, Your Majesty,” the captain said softly, as though Grus wouldn’t have noticed without being told.

  “By the gods, we are,” Grus agreed. Yes, with the Scepter of Mercy in his hands, those first three words were something more than a common figure of speech. Olor and Quelea and the rest of the gods in the heavens might not care much about what went on in the material world, but they’d cared enough—or worried enough—to give mankind the Scepter.