The Scepter's Return

by Harry Turtledove

  “Is there any way I can get out of it?” asked Grus, who had trouble imagining the gods in the heavens paying much attention to grayer.

  “It is required,” Pipilo repeated. “Anyone who does not conform to the rule here will find his stay much less pleasant than it might be otherwise.”

  With that not so veiled threat ringing in his ears, Grus followed Pipilo to the chapel. Monks streamed in from all over the monastery. It held more of them than Grus had expected. He was relieved to see they weren’t all men he’d sent into exile here. That would have made his stay even less pleasant than it was liable to be otherwise. All he could do now was try to make the best of things.

  “Welcome, brethren, welcome,” Pipilo said from the pulpit. “A new brother has joined us today, as some of you will already know. Please welcome Brother Grus to our ranks.”

  “Welcome, Brother Grus!” the other monks chorused. Some of them actually sounded as though they meant it. Others stared at him with the same vindictive relish Petrosus had shown. He could read their faces with no trouble at all. Here is the man who put me here, and now he’s here himself, they were thinking. Let’s see how he likes it!

  Whatever they were thinking, they got no chance to say it to Grus’ face. Abbot Pipilo led them in prayers and hymns to King Olor and Queen Quelea. Grus knew the prayers and the words to the hymns. Coming out with them was easier than staying silent. He didn’t think they would do any harm. On the other hand, he didn’t think they would do any good, either.

  When the prayers ended, the monks went back to their labors. Grus looked around, wondering what to do next. Pipilo came up to him. “This way, Brother, if you please,” he said. Shrugging, Grus followed.

  Pipilo took him to the kitchens. They were almost as large as the ones for the royal palace. The abbot introduced Grus to Brother Neophron, the chief cook. “Have you had any practice working with food?” Neophron asked.

  “Not for a good many years,” Grus answered.

  Neophron’s sigh made several chins wobble. Like most cooks who were good at their job, he was a hefty man. “Well, why don’t you start off peeling turnips and chopping them up?” he said. “You can’t do much harm there.”

  Several baskets of white-and-purple turnips stood on a counter. With another shrug, Grus got to work. From the Scepter of Mercy to this, he thought. Thank you, Ortalis. After a while, though, he found he minded the work less than he’d expected. It wasn’t exciting, but it struck him as worthwhile. He was helping to feed people, himself among them. How could that be bad?

  After half an hour or so, Neophron casually strolled over to see how he was doing. The chief cook nodded, which also made the flesh under his jaw shake. “I’ve seen neater work,” he said, “but that comes with doing it. You’re willing enough, by Olor’s beard.”

  Grus got a break for noontime prayers and then for the midday meal. It was quite plain: bread and cheese and beer. But there was enough of it. The monks ate at long tables in a large dining hall. Grus recognized fewer men than he’d expected. Not recognizing them, and not being recognized by them, came as something of a relief.

  After lunch, Grus went back to the kitchens. He cut up more turnips, which went into great pots of stew for supper. He washed dishes. He chopped firewood. Along with the turnips, the stew had barley and onions and peas and beans and, for flavor, a little sausage finely chopped. A cook who served it in the palace would have been on the street the next minute. For soldiers in the field, though, it would have done fine. It filled Grus up.

  The cell to which Pipilo led him after sunset prayers was just that. It was barely big enough to turn around in. The latrine was down the corridor. His nose would have told him which way if Pipilo hadn’t. The bed was a straw-stuffed pallet on a ledge at the back of the cell. The wool blanket was rough and scratchy, but it was thick.

  Grus lay down. The only light came from a distant torch. The straw rustled under him. He’d slept very little the night before in the boat with Gygis. He’d worked hard since coming to the monastery. He yawned. He could have lain there brooding and plotting. He fell asleep instead.

  Sosia was furious, and didn’t even try to hide it. “He can’t do this!” she snarled at Lanius in the near-privacy of their bedchamber. “He can’t! You’re not going to let him get away with it, are you?”

  “Well, as long as the soldiers do what he tells them to, and as long as the people here don’t start throwing rocks at him whenever he sticks his nose outside the palace, I’m not sure what I can do,” Lanius said reasonably. “How long that will be, I don’t know. Not too long, I hope.”

  “I’ll throw a rock at him if he sticks his nose anywhere near me!” Sosia said. “My own brother! My brother did that! My brother did it to my father! Some fine family we turned out to be, isn’t it?”

  Lanius aimed to go on looking at the bright side of things as long as he could. “He sent your father to the Maze,” he said. “He didn’t do anything more than that, and I suppose he could have. He hasn’t done anything to either one of us, and he hasn’t done anything to the children.”

  His wife’s hands automatically went to her belly, as though to protect the new life growing there. “He’d better not! He’ll be sorry if he tries!”

  “Well, he hasn’t, and he could have done that, too,” Lanius said. “If he hasn’t, it probably means he doesn’t want to.”

  “He’d better not,” Sosia repeated darkly. “King Ortalis!” Her laughter had a hysterical edge. “Olor’s beard, Lanius, he hasn’t got any more business running this kingdom than one of your moncats does.”

  He has less business running the kingdom than Pouncer does, I think. Pouncer was able to pick up the Scepter of Mercy. Can Ortalis? Lanius kept that to himself. It wasn’t that he didn’t want Sosia to know about his doubts. They might have helped set her mind at ease. But she might have let her brother know about them. Lanius didn’t want Ortalis having any idea that he had doubts. He wanted his brother-in-law confident that he could handle the Scepter.

  If Ortalis wasn’t confident, if he thought something might go wrong, or if he thought Sosia thought Lanius thought something might go wrong, he’d invent some excuse not to try to take it in his hands. He might be able to get away with that, too, at least for a while.

  What if he stands in front of the Scepter of Mercy, sets his hand on it—and up it comes? That was Lanius’ … oh, not quite nightmare, but worry. If the Scepter judged Ortalis worthy of being King of Avornis, Lanius knew he would have to do the same, as he’d said he would.

  And then his long, slow, patient, often painful task would have to start all over again. He’d needed years to win back even a fraction of the kingship from Grus. Would he have to begin anew with Ortalis, who would probably be even more suspicious of him than Grus had been? Could he steal out of the shadows an inch at a time again?

  Grus in the Maze! Grus in a monastery! Lanius tried to imagine that, but the picture didn’t want to form in his mind. Grus was made for giving orders. If he was suddenly made into a monk, he’d have to take them instead. How would he like that? Would he be able to do it at all? Lanius had a hard time believing it.

  He wondered if he ought to tell Ortalis about How to Be a King. He shrugged. If the Scepter accepts him, maybe I will. Ortalis could use a book about how to rule Avornis. Lanius thought Sosia was right—her brother had no idea on his own. But would he care to look at it, or would he only laugh?

  Ortalis, from what Lanius had seen, got few ideas of any kind on his own. The ones he did have often involved hurting people or beasts. How had he pulled off such a neat, smooth usurpation? It was almost as though he’d had someone else, someone competent, whispering in his ear all the way through it.

  “Your Majesty,” the Voice whispered. King Ortalis had liked hearing that from his subjects the past few days. He liked just about everything about being king—he’d especially liked sending his father to the Maze. But most of all, he thought, he liked hearing the Voice accl
aim him.

  As always, what he saw in these dreams was better than what he saw in real life. The sky was bluer. The sun was brighter. The air smelled sweeter. The land was greener. And, in these dreams, the Voice told him what a wonderful fellow he was. And when the Voice told him something, he had to believe it, because how could a Voice like that lie?

  “Your Majesty,” it whispered again, caressingly. “You see, Your Majesty? Everything went just the way you hoped it would.”

  “Yes,” Ortalis murmured. “Oh, yes.” He wriggled with pleasure. Nothing compared to this, not even taking the lash in his hands.

  The voice might have said, Everything went just the way I told you it would. That would have been as true. Without the Voice urging him on, Ortalis never would have had the nerve to move against his father. The price for failure was too high. And he would have failed; he could feel it. He wasn’t very able most of the time, and was miserably aware of it. But with the Voice behind him, with the Voice seeing things he missed, he hadn’t made a single mistake. And so he was King of Avornis, and his father was … a monk. Good riddance, too!

  “Now all I need to do is take care of the stupid Scepter, and then I’ll be king for—a long, long time,” he said happily. He’d almost said, for the rest of my life, but he didn’t want to think about life ending. He wanted to think about doing what he wanted, and about making everybody else do what he wanted. He wondered which he would enjoy more. Both, he thought, and wriggled again.

  “Take care of … the Scepter?” the Voice asked after a longer pause than usual. Maybe Ortalis was imagining things (well, of course Ortalis was imagining things—this was a dream, wasn’t it?), but it didn’t seem quite as smooth as usual.

  “That’s right,” Ortalis said. “It’s nothing, really. I’ve got to keep Lanius happy, that’s all. He can pick up the stinking thing, and my miserable excuse for a father could pick up the stinking thing, so now I’ll pick up the stinking thing, too, and then I’ll go on doing what I was going to do anyway.”

  “You—agreed—to this with Lanius?” No, the Voice didn’t sound smooth anymore. It didn’t sound happy, either. If Ortalis hadn’t known better, he would have said it sounded angry and disgusted.

  He nodded even so, or his dream-self did. “Sure. Why not?” he said. “One more stupid thing to take care of, that’s all.”

  Suddenly, the sun in his dreamscape wasn’t just bright. It was too bright. The sky was still blue—as blue as a bruise. The leaves on the trees remained green—the green of rotting meat. The air smelled of carrion, and carrion birds flew through it—toward Ortalis.

  “You fool!” the Voice cried thunderously. “You idiot! You imbecile! You ass! Better to kill Lanius, better to slaughter him, than to play his games!”

  “But everybody expects it now,” Ortalis protested. Trying to tell the Voice something it didn’t want to hear was much tougher than going along with everything it said. He did his best to gather himself. “Don’t worry. I can do it.”

  “Lanius tricked you—that cowardly wretch,” the Voice growled. “Better, far better, you should have slain him when you pushed aside your father.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ortalis said. “His family’s given Avornis kings for a long time. There’d be trouble—big trouble—if I knocked him off. Even my old man never had the nerve to do that.”

  He made the Voice backtrack. He never understood what a rare achievement that was. “All right,” it said grudgingly. “All right. If you must be soft, then I suppose you must. I thought you would have enjoyed the killing, but if not, not. Still, you would have done better to send him to the Maze along with Grus.”

  “Maybe,” Ortalis said, not believing it for a minute. Lanius in the palace could be a puppet, but he was still visibly king. That was how Grus had worked things. Ortalis’ father could go to the Maze and stop being king without having too many people pitch a fit. He was only a usurper himself, if a highly successful one. But if Lanius went into exile … Riots didn’t come to the city of Avornis very often. Ortalis wasn’t sure enough soldiers would go on backing him to keep him safe if people rioted for Lanius.

  The Voice sighed a heavy sigh. The dream-landscape around Ortalis came back toward what it had been—but not quite far enough back. Nor was the Voice back to its usual smooth self when it said, “I suppose we shall just have to hope for the best—but oh, what a feckless fool you are!”

  Ortalis woke with a start, with his eyes staring, with his heart pounding, with cold sweat all over his body. His father had awakened like that—just like that—a good many times. So had his brother-in-law. Either of them could have told Ortalis exactly why he felt the way he did, exactly what—or rather, whom—he’d been confronting. They could have, yes, but he’d sent the one away and estranged the other. He had to try to figure things out on his own—but he, unlike Lanius, had never been much good at figuring things out.

  Limosa stirred beside him. “What’s the matter?” she asked muzzily.

  “It’s nothing. Go back to sleep. Sorry I bothered you,” Ortalis answered. “I—I had a bad dream, that’s all.”

  That wasn’t all, and he knew it. What he didn’t know was how many times his father had told his mother the same things, and how many times his brother-in-law had told his sister. He didn’t know they’d been lying each and every time, either. He did know, and know full well, he was lying now.

  “Poor dear,” Limosa muttered, then started to snore again.

  Ortalis lay awake a long, long time. Eventually, though, he fell asleep once more, too—a small miracle, though he also did not know that. What he did know when he woke was that the world around him looked better than it had for some time. He had a less highly colored memory now of the country of his dreams.

  He drank several cups of wine with breakfast—to fortify myself, he thought. Limosa beamed at him. He looked away. He didn’t feel like being beamed at, not this morning. After he lifted the Scepter of Mercy, after he held it in his hand, after he showed Lanius and his father (though his father wouldn’t be there to see it) … And after I show the Voice, he thought. The Voice, after all, had found him imperfectly wonderful. Therefore he found it imperfectly wonderful as well, and much in need of showing.

  His followers—he would not think, let alone say, such a vulgarism as henchmen—were among the officers gathered around the Scepter. They all looked confident. And here came Lanius. Ortalis wondered if he should have Serinus and Gygis and the rest of his—his followers—pack Lanius off to a monastery after the Scepter was his. Maybe the Voice hadn’t had such a bad idea there after all.

  “Well,” Ortalis said lightly, “let’s get it over with.” No one else even smiled. Other people were much more serious about this … this folderol than he was. It was all foolishness and a waste of time. Ortalis knew that. If his somber subjects didn’t, he’d show them by …

  He set his right hand on the Scepter of Mercy. It felt like ordinary metal under his hand—cool and hard, but warming rapidly to his touch. He lifted—or rather, he tried to lift. The Scepter might have held the weight of the world. Ortalis tried to lift again—and, grunting with effort, failed again. Strain as he would, the Scepter of Mercy refused to budge.

  “It will not accept him,” an officer—one of his men—said, even as he strained. All the guardsmen, even Serinus and Gygis, turned to Lanius and bowed very low. “Your Majesty!” they chorused.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Lanius had been crowned when he was still a little boy. Now, at last, he truly was King of Avornis. No one could tell him what to do, and there were no rival candidates. Ortalis had eliminated the last two, though he’d intended to take out only one.

  “Your Majesty!” The officers wasted no time acknowledging him. Serinus, who’d been strongest for Ortalis, bowed almost double. “How may we serve you, Your Majesty?”

  “I think you had better lay hold of my brother-in-law,” Lanius said reluctantly. They did, not without a scuffle. Lanius eyed
his brother-in-law with bemusement. “What shall I do with you?”

  Ortalis’ reply was colorful but not altogether relevant. Even some of the guardsmen, who used obscenity as a bad cook used salt—too much, and without even thinking about it—seemed impressed. Lanius knew he heard words and combinations he’d never run into before. He tried to remember some of the better ones in case he ever needed them.

  When Ortalis ran dry at last—it took a while—Lanius said, “I know what seems fitting. I am going to send you to a monastery, the same way you sent your father to one.”

  He rapidly discovered Ortalis hadn’t used up his store of bad language. Lanius marveled that the table and other fixtures in the Scepter’s room didn’t catch fire. “And your stinking horse, too!” Ortalis roared.

  “That will be enough of that,” Lanius said. “Take him to his bedchamber and confine him there.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” the guards officers said, and they did. Lanius watched to make sure men he was confident were loyal to him outnumbered the officers who’d cozied up to Ortalis over the past few months. He didn’t want his brother-in-law spirited out of the palace, out of the city of Avornis, so he could cause more trouble.

  A couple of minutes later, a woman’s screams erupted from the direction of the bedchamber. Lanius sighed. Limosa must have discovered that her husband had had what Lanius thought to be the shortest reign in the history of Avornis. He recalled there had once been an arch-hallow who died of joy on learning of his promotion, but no king had ever ruled for only a handful of days.

  “How may we serve you, Your Majesty?” asked one of the officers still standing near the Scepter of Mercy.

  After a moment’s thought, Lanius answered, “Summon Hirundo and Pterocles to the throne room. I will meet them there in half an hour.” He paused again, then added, “Pick some soldiers you can rely on and confine Serinus and Gygis in a place where they can’t escape and can’t communicate with their closest comrades.”