The Scepter's return

CHAPTER EIGHT

A bird sang in the gardens around the palace. Lanius wondered what sort of bird it was. Some people could tell one bird from another by the briefest snatch of song. The king wasn't one of them. He knew a hawk from a heron, but not much more, not by note alone.

I could learn, he thought. I could, if I had the time. But that was a formidable challenge. He already had hobbies — the moncats, the archives, serving girls every now and then. When he was younger, he'd taught himself to draw and paint, but he didn't have the time to stay sharp at that. Being a king swallowed more hours than he wished it did.

The bird went on singing. It didn't care whether he knew what it was. It was singing for the joy of it, or maybe to find a mate — which involved a different kind of joy.

Sosia looked across the breakfast table at Lanius. "I just asked you a question," she said pointedly. "Didn't you hear me?"

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't. I'm afraid I was listening to the bird outside."

She gave him the withering glance wives reserve for husbands who aren't all they might be. "I might have known," she said. "How many times have I caught you with your head in the clouds?"

"It wasn't in the clouds," Lanius protested. "Just in the garden."

"Better there than some places," Sosia said. She knew about his occasional hobby, and didn't like it. She also thought it more occasional than it was. She would have liked it even less if she'd known more about it. With exaggerated patience, she repeated herself. "I said, have you been paying attention to the company my brother's been keeping lately?"

Lanius shook his head. "I generally try not to pay attention to the company your brother keeps, unless you mean Anser. Wouldn't you say it's more Limosa's worry than mine, anyhow?"

Sosia made an exasperated noise. "Not that kind of company." The hooded glance she sent him said she thought he knew too much about that kind of company himself. With an obvious effort, she made herself put that thought aside. She went on, "I meant some of the young officers he's been drinking with."

"Ortalis?" Lanius said in surprise. His wife nodded. He took a sip of wine while he thought. "Three things occur to me." He ticked them off on his fingers. "Maybe they're men with pretty sisters — or pretty wives. Maybe they're men who like to hunt. Or maybe, knowing Ortalis, they're men with, ah, peculiar tastes."

"I'd think he's chatted up enough of them to make that last unlikely — although you never can tell." Sosia's mouth twisted in distaste. "The other two? Maybe. There's something else, though — something you're not seeing."

"What?" Lanius asked in real perplexity. He thought he'd thought of everything. He took pride in thinking of as many things as he could.

But Sosia found something he'd missed. "Maybe he's plotting with them."

"Ortalis?" Now Lanius all but squeaked in surprise. "He's done a lot of nasty things, but they're all nasty because he is what he is. They're not nasty because he's after the crown."

"Not yet," his wife said grimly. "But if Limosa has a boy… He may care more on account of his children than he does for himself. Plenty of people are like that."

Lanius couldn't tell her she was wrong, for he knew she wasn't. He said, "Well, I'll keep an eye on it." He didn't mean he'd spy on Ortalis himself. He had palace servants he trusted to take care of that for him. "If he's talking with young officers, he can't mean too much by it. He'd be talking with their superiors if he did."

"Maybe," Sosia said again. Again, she didn't sound as though she believed it. "Sometimes, though, if you get the junior officers on your side, they'll bring the senior officers with them."

Once more, Lanius couldn't tell her she was wrong. He said, "You can come up with things like that, because you're as sly as your father." He seldom praised Grus' cleverness, but he knew he couldn't ignore it. "But Ortalis?" He shook his head. "Say what you want about your brother, but nobody's ever accused him of being subtle."

"If he were subtle, I wouldn't know what he was doing, would I?" his wife retorted. "Even if he's not subtle, that doesn't mean he's not dangerous."

"We'll see what's going on, that's all." Lanius could easily imagine Ortalis as dangerous to him in a fit of temper. Imagining his brother-in-law as dangerous in a conspiracy was something else again.

Sosia scowled at him. "You don't believe me. You don't want to believe me. You'd sooner pay attention to the stupid bird that was singing out there."

"I've lived in the palace my whole life," Lanius answered. "I like to think I have some idea when trouble's brewing and when it isn't. Just because I don't agree that Ortalis is doing something particularly bad doesn't mean I'm not paying attention to you."

"You weren't before," Sosia reminded him. "Not very long before, either."

"I am now, though. I have been." Lanius did his best to seem virtuous and innocent. He must have succeeded; his wife stopped nagging him.

Flies buzzed through the Avornan encirclement of Trabzun. Grus ignored them when he could and slapped at them when he couldn't. With all the garbage and sewage accumulating as his army besieged the town, he couldn't be surprised the bugs were bad. If anything, they could have been worse.

Grus made a point of appearing now here, now there, all around the encirclement. He wanted the Menteshe to notice him and to wonder what sort of scheme he was plotting. The only thing he didn't want them to do was come up with the right answer.

Shielded — Grus hoped — by Pterocles' masking spell, sappers dug down toward the walls of Trabzun. The king showed himself to the Menteshe there as often as he did anywhere else. "Shouldn't you stay away from this part of the line, Your Majesty?" Hirundo asked him after one of those appearances.

He shook his head. "I don't think so. If I show myself around four fifths of the circle but not right here, the garrison will start wondering why. If I show myself all the way around, they won't care more about one stretch of the line than any other."

Hirundo thought that over. He overacted thinking it over, in fact; he grunted and stroked his chin and stared up into the sky. At last, reluctantly, he nodded. "You've got a complicated way of looking at the world, haven't you?" he said.

"It's a complicated place," Grus answered. "Making things as simple as you can is good. Making them too simple isn't."

"How do you tell the difference?" The general sounded genuinely curious.

"Well, if you start making a lot of mistakes, you probably think things are simpler than they really are," Grus said.

Hirundo started to say something else. Before he could, a soldier ran toward Grus and him shouting, "Your Majesty! General! Your Majesty!"

"I don't know that I like the sound of that," Hirundo said.

"I do know that I don't like it a bit. Something's gone wrong somewhere." Grus raised his voice and waved to the soldier. "We're here. What is it?"

"Your Majesty, there's a good-sized Menteshe army coming up from the south," the man replied.

"Well, we knew that was liable to happen," Hirundo said.

"So we did," Grus agreed. "We've done what we could to get ready for it, too. Now we get to see how good a job that was."

"I'd better go out to the outer works and have a look for myself," Hirundo said.

"I'll come, too," the king told him. "If I start joggling your elbow, don't be shy about letting me know."

"Everyone knows how shy and retiring I am, Your Majesty," Hirundo replied. "People have been talking about it for years." He didn't even try to pretend that Grus should take him seriously. He knew better. Grus didn't say anything. He just rolled his eyes and went along with the general.

He made sure trumpeters came with them, too. He didn't know what orders Hirundo would give, but he had a pretty good notion. Trumpeters would spread the word far faster than runners could.

The outer works, by now, were head-high, with a rammed-earth step for archers, pikemen, and observers. Grus got up on the step and peered south. Hirundo had gotten up there ahead of him. The approaching army was close enough to let the king see individual riders under the cloud of dust the mass of them kicked up.

"I wonder how serious they are," he said. "Well, I doubt they came here for a holiday," Hirundo observed.

"Oh, so do I. But whether they make an attack and go away with their honor satisfied or really press it home… That makes a lot of difference," Grus said. "What sort of sally the garrison inside Trabzun makes will be interesting, too."

"There's one word for it." Hirundo looked back over his shoulder toward the walls of the besieged city. "I think I'd better order the men into back-to-back. The other interesting question — that word again! — is whether we really do have enough men to hold the outer ring and the inner at the same time. Well, we'll find out, won't we?" He sounded lighthearted. If he'd sounded as worried as he felt… he probably would have sounded as worried as Grus felt, too.

The king made himself nod. He made himself seem calm while he did it, too. He said, "Yes, that seems to be what needs doing, all right." Hirundo spoke to the trumpeters. They blared out the command. Other musicians all around the Avornans' ring took it up.

Swearing soldiers sprinted to their stations. Grus looked back toward Trabzun, as Hirundo had before him. He didn't see any sudden burst of activity from the defenders atop it. Of course, if the Menteshe commander inside the town had any brains, he wouldn't. The warriors in there would open a gate and storm out fighting without giving anything away beforehand. Grus knew that perfectly well. He eyed the town anyway. Not all commanders had brains. That, unfortunately, was just as true for Avornans as it was for Menteshe.

Something else occurred to him. He did some swearing of his own, then hurried off to find Pterocles. The wizard, as he'd expected, stood near the hole in the ground where the miners worked. "We may need your magic against the nomads outside," Grus said. "Will your masking spell hold up for a while if you aren't there to keep an eye on it every minute?"

"Nomads outside?" Pterocles peered around in surprise. Up until that moment, the horn calls and the soldiers running back and forth had escaped his notice. He sent Grus an accusing stare. "Something is going on, isn't it?"

"Oh, you might say so," the king answered. Since Pterocles plainly had no idea what, Grus filled him in with a few sentences, finishing, "Can you leave this by itself, or at least to a junior wizard?"

"Someone will need to keep it going." Pterocles shouted, and kept shouting until another wizard came up. That took longer than Grus thought it should have; Pterocles didn't seem to be the only absentminded sorcerer who'd come south of the Stura. But Pterocles bowed when the other wizard was in place. "I am at your service, Your Majesty."

"Come on, then." Grus picked up a shield some foot soldier had forgotten. He tossed it to Pterocles, who caught it awkwardly. "Here, I expect you'll want this."

By the expression on Pterocles' face, he'd never grabbed anything he wanted less. But, under Grus' stem eye, he didn't let go. Grus commandeered a shield for himself a moment later. Well before they got back to the outer palisade, arrows started coming down not far away from them. "Oh," Pterocles said in what sounded like real surprise. "Now I understand."

"I'm so glad," Grus said. The look the sorcerer sent him was distinctly wounded. But he yelped like a puppy with a stepped-on tail when an arrow thudded into his shield. It might have gone by harmlessly had he not carried the round, bronze-faced wooden disk. On the other hand, it might not have. Grus gave back a sardonic nod. "You see?"

"Well, now that you mention it, yes," Pterocles replied in an unusually small voice.

Hirundo pointed out toward the Menteshe. "So far, they're just riding around shooting at us. They won't do us much harm that way. We've hit a few of them, too, though their bows shoot farther than ours. But we'll start using the dart-throwers and stone-throwers on 'em any minute. By Olor's mighty fist, they can't outrange those, and I don't think they'll like 'em very much."

He proved a good prophet. The engines began to buck and snap, sending their missiles farther and faster than any arrow could fly. A dart could pin a nomad's leg to his horse, or go right through him and pierce the man behind him. A twenty-pound stone ball would mash a man's head, or a horse's, to red rags. In moving out of range of such weapons, the Menteshe also moved out beyond their own ability to strike at the Avornans.

"If they want to give us trouble, they'll have to close with us." Hirundo sounded somberly satisfied. "Otherwise, they can ride and whoop and holler as much as they please, but they're just a bunch of nuisances."

Before Grus could answer, cries of alarm rose from the inner palisade. "A sally! A sally!" The king caught the news through the general din.

Menteshe were pouring out of the gates of Trabzun and swarming toward the palisade. Their guttural war cries filled the air. "Hold them!" Grus shouted to the men on the inner ring. "Don't let them get over!"

"Now we see how smart they are and how smooth they are. Can they hit us from inside and outside at the same time?"

Hirundo might have been a scholar curious to see what someone else's students knew about his specialty.

Grus admired that detachment without wanting to imitate it. "If they can get over from inside and outside at the same time, we're in trouble," he said.

'There is that," Hirundo agreed. "We just have to make sure they can't, then, don't we?"

"Would be nice," Grus said. Hirundo laughed merrily, as though they were a pair of tradesmen bantering back and forth in front of their shops. And so they were, but at the moment their trade involved bloodshed and slaughter. As though to underscore the point, an arrow thrummed past Grus' head. He jerked up his shield. That would have done him no good at all if the arrow had been a little better aimed.

He trotted toward the inner palisade, drawing his sword as he did. "It's the king!" Avornan soldiers called to one another. "The king is coming to help us!"

Grus laughed almost as hard as Hirundo had a moment earlier. He would fight if he had to. He hadn't been a bad swordsman when he was half his present age. He still knew what to do with a blade. His body, though, was less willing — no, less able — to do it than it had been thirty years before.

Pikemen, archers, and swordsmen were holding back the garrison of Trabzun. The ditch in front of the palisade also helped. Some of the Menteshe leaped down into it and then tried to scramble up over the palisade and into the Avornans' ring around their city. Most of them got shot or stabbed before they even came close to the top.

Grus had always thought that the Avornans knew more about attacking works than the nomads did. The Menteshe hadn't proved good at taking walled towns in southern Avornis during their last invasion. They'd destroyed crops around them and tried to starve them into submission. The few times they'd tried to storm them, they'd failed, and paid heavily for their failure.

Here, though, they knew what to do about the ditch — or some of them did. They threw brush hurdles into it and ran across those before the Avornans could set them on fire. Then they started trying to boost one another over the palisade. They had a much better chance of managing that from the hurdles than they did from the bottom of the ditch.

Now they could strike back at the Avornans. One of Grus' men fell, his face a gory mask from the sword stroke that had laid him low. A Menteshe scrambled over the palisade and inside. Several Avornans rushed at him. He went down before any other nomads could join him.

Even so, shouts from all around the inner ring warned that this wasn't the only place where the Menteshe were using those bound piles of brush to span the ditch. More cries rose from behind Grus. That could only mean the horsemen outside the ring were trying to break in, too. He wondered whether they'd also brought brushwood with them. I'll find out, he thought.

Meanwhile, more Menteshe made it over the inner palisade. Knots of cursing, shouting men battled one another. A nomad broke out of the nearest knot and rushed at Grus.

The nomad cut at his head. He blocked the blow. Sparks flew as iron belled off iron. The Menteshe slashed again. He had no style, but what seemed like endless youth and vigor. That might suffice, and Grus knew it.

Then another Avornan ran at the nomad. The Menteshe's face twisted in anger and fear. He didn't fancy facing two at once. He had no choice, though. Figuring — no doubt accurately — the young soldier was more dangerous than the frost-bearded king, he gave more of his attention to the new foe.

He likely would have beaten Grus without much trouble had they faced each other with no interference from other fighters. But he couldn't fend off the king with only a third or a quarter of his aim focused on him. Grus' sword went home below the nomad's right arm, a spot the fellow's boiled-leather corselet didn't protect. The Menteshe howled like a wolf. The pain of the wound distracted him, and the other Avornan's sword bit into his neck. He swayed, blood spurting from the wound, and then crumpled.

"We make a good team, Your Majesty," the Avornan soldier said.

"So we do," Grus replied. "Tell me your name." "I'm called Esacus, Your Majesty."

"Esacus," Grus repeated, fixing the name in his mind. "Well, Esacus, you'll have a reward when all this is done."

"Thank you very much, but I didn't do it for that," the soldier said.

"Which makes you more deserving, not less," Grus told him. Esacus scratched his head, plainly not understanding. That proved he'd never had anything to do with the royal court. People there were apt to act much more heroic if they thought the king's eye was on them than they might have otherwise.

"You stay back, Your Majesty," Esacus called as more Menteshe made it over the palisade. Shouting, "Avornis!" the soldier rushed into the fight.

Grus did stay back. He knew good advice when he heard it. The Menteshe couldn't get enough men within the Avornan ring at the same time to give the defenders too much trouble.

The nomads were also trying to break into the palisaded ring from the outside. Despite the barrage of arrows they rained on the defenders, they weren't having much luck. They must have hoped that barrage would break the Avornans, which would give them the chance they needed to force an entry. Unlike the Menteshe inside Trabzun, the relief force hadn't brought any hurdles or other ways to cross the ditch and come to grips with Grus' men at close quarters.

They were brave. Like anything else, bravery didn't matter so much without the talent that would have supported it. If anything, it made the nomads take heavier losses than they would have with less courage. They kept on attacking even when the attacks couldn't succeed — and they paid for it.

At last, they had taken as much as they could take. They gave up trying to force their way into the ring. A few at a time, they began to ride off. Some lingered to keep on shooting at the Avornans from beyond the range where Grus' archers could respond. Then a stone flung from an engine knocked a chieftain out of the saddle — and knocked over his horse, too. After that, the nomads seemed to decide they'd had enough. The men who'd lingered rode away after their comrades.

Grus ordered some of the Avornans from the outer works to go to the aid of the men who were fighting off the much more stubborn attack on the inner ones. When the Menteshe trying to break out of Trabzun saw that the Avornans battling them were being reinforced, they sullenly drew back into the city — those who could, at any rate.

Later, the king realized he should have tried to force an entry then. The Menteshe were in disarray, and the gates had to stay open for a while to let them back within the walls. But the nomads, though they hadn't won, had fought well — well enough to rock the Avornans back on their heels. Grus did not issue the order. Neither did Hirundo. No one pursued the Menteshe as they retreated.

What Grus did do as the fighting eased was let out a long sigh of relief and stab his sword into the soil to clean the blood off the blade. He sent runners out to find Hirundo and bring him back. The general nodded as he came up. "Well, Your Majesty, we got through that one," he said.

"I was thinking the same thing." Grus spotted Pterocles and waved to him. "Is the mine still masked from the Menteshe? I hope none of them stumbled down the hole when they broke in. And I hope the wizard you set there didn't run away from his post when that happened."

"I'll go find out," Pterocles said, which was exactly what Grus wanted to hear from him. The wizard hurried away.

"We can always start the undermining again somewhere else if things did get buggered up," Hirundo said.

"I know. But we would have wasted a lot of time and a lot of work," the king replied. "And if the Menteshe know we're trying to dig under the wall, they'll countermine to keep us away." He snapped his fingers. "Which reminds me — we have to bring in the hurdles the nomads used to cross the inner ditch."

"I should hope so. If we don't, they're liable to sneak out at night and see if they can slit our throats while we're sleeping," Hirundo said.

"Well, yes, that, too," Grus said. Hirundo gave him a puzzled look. He explained what he had in mind.

Hirundo heard him out and then bowed. "That's very nice, Your Majesty. Very fitting, you might say. I'll give the orders right away." As Pterocles had a few minutes earlier, he bustled off to tend to what needed doing.

The wizard returned at a trot, the smile on Pterocles' face telling Grus what he needed to know even before the wizard said, "All's very well, Your Majesty. No trouble came too close to Calidris, and he kept the spell going all through the fight. The Menteshe in Trabzun don't know what we're up to."

"Ah." Grus smiled, too. His was a more wolfish expression than the one the wizard wore. "Then that work will go on. How much longer till we're under Trabzun's walls? Do you happen to know?"

Pterocles shook his head. "I spoke to the sorcerer, not to the minemaster."

"Too bad," Grus said. "We'll go on till we finish, that's all." He looked south, toward Yozgat. "Yes, we'll go on till we finish."

King Lanius looked up toward the skylight set into the roof above the royal archives. Dusty sunbeams filtered down to where he sat. No one had ever been able to get those skylights clean. Lanius suspected much of the dirt was on the inside of the glass, and thereby inaccessible. The only way to be rid of it would be to take out the panes and replace them with clean ones.

A faint skittering noise came from somewhere in the bowels of the archives. Lanius sighed. He knew mice got in here. The only thing he didn't know was how many precious parchments they'd chewed up before he ever got the chance to see them.

Grus had written that he was besieging Trabzun, formerly Trapezus. Avornis hadn't owned the city for centuries. Even so, the archives held papers and parchments about the city and what it had been like in bygone days — tax records, reports on the state of the walls, appeals to lawsuits that had gone all the way to the city of Avornis. Lanius had run into them from time to time when he was looking for other things, sometimes when he was looking for nothing in particular.

He'd run into them, yes, but he hadn't thought anything about it. Why should he have? The Kingdom of Avornis had lost more than a few cities in the Menteshe invasions. Quite a few of them, these days, were only ruins. The one that really impinged on Avornan consciousness was Yozgat, and that more because it held the Scepter of Mercy than for any other reason.

Lanius shook his head. The road to Yozgat ran through Trabzun, and he had to think about Trabzun now.

Dust rose in choking clouds when the king pulled a crate off a shelf. Coughing, he carried the crate to a table. He thought he remembered finding papers from Trabzun — or rather, from Trapezus — in it. As he pulled out documents and started reading them, he happened to look down at himself. His tunic, though old, had been clean when he put it on. Now dust and dirt streaked and spotted it. He tried to brush off some of the dust with his hands, and raised a small cloud around himself without getting the tunic much cleaner.

The king began to wonder whether he knew what he was talking about. The crate didn't seem to have any of the documents he was looking for. Were they really somewhere else? Was he misremembering? He'd done that when he was looking for papers from Yozgat. Once could happen to anybody. Twice? Didn't twice suggest his memory wasn't as good as he thought it was? For a man who prided himself on his wits — not least because he didn't have a whole lot of other things on which to pride himself — that was a disheartening notion.

"Ha!" he exclaimed as he got near the bottom of the crate. There they were! He'd buried them under other documents that had seemed more interesting the last time he went through them.

Tax registers from Trapezus wouldn't do Grus any good. The people who'd dutifully paid those taxes (or not so dutifully tried to evade them) were hundreds of years dead. Their descendants, if they had any, were probably thralls. But…

"Ha!" Lanius said again, and plucked a parchment from the crate. Here was a map of Trapezus long ago, showing which of those taxpayers — recalcitrant or otherwise — owned which properties in the city. Again, those property owners were ashes for a very long time. Many of the buildings were bound to have fallen down between then and now. Odds were, though, that the streets still ran as they had in those far-off days, which meant Grus might find the map worth having.

Lanius sighed once more. Part of him still resented working for the man who'd stolen half his throne and far more than half his power. But he couldn't deny, however much he wanted to, that Grus had done a good job with that power. If, say, Ortalis had been the usurper… Lanius shook his head. No, he didn't want to think about that.

Below the map lay a report from an officer in Trapezus on the walls, and on repairs that had been made after an earthquake. Lanius decided to send that along, too. Maybe there had been more earthquakes since, but it might prove useful.

He was sure Grus would be interested in some of the things he'd found out about Yozgat. He would tell his father-in-law about those when Grus got back to the city of Avornis. He didn't want to put them in writing. They would have to travel a long way south of the Stura before they got to Grus. Lanius knew Menteshe raiders bedeviled the route by which supplies and letters went down to the Avornan army. If he went into too much detail and the dispatch happened to be captured — that wouldn't be good at all.

And it could end up a lot worse than merely no good at all. A captured dispatch from one King of Avornis to the other might end up in the Banished One's hands. That would do for a catastrophe until a more emphatic word came along. If the Banished One suspected any of what Lanius had in mind, all his carefully laid plans would fall to pieces then and there.

He heard another skittering noise and looked up, hoping it was Pouncer. But no moncat came out hoping for a treat. Just another mouse, he thought. He'd tried setting traps in the archives, traps that would smash any mouse taking the bait. The next dead mouse he saw in any of them would be the first. He had almost smashed his own foot in one; only a hasty backward leap saved him. After that, he took out the traps.

Thinking of that fiasco made him start to laugh. What if he'd forgotten one and left it here? How long would it be before some other king — or perhaps some scholar — prowled through the archives the way he liked to do? A hundred years from now, or two hundred, would the man who went through the archives have any idea the trap that had smashed his foot was set by a King of Avornis? Lanius didn't see how he could.

Sosia gave him a peculiar look when he told her about the thought later that day. "You find the oddest things to worry about," she said.

"I wasn't worried. I just thought it was… interesting," Lanius said.

"Interesting!" His wife snorted. "Who in the world could care about what happens a hundred years from now?"

The Banished One could, Lanius thought. But he didn't want to be compared to the exiled god, and the Banished One wasn't in the world willingly. There was another answer he could give her, though. "I do. The dynasty reaches back further than that. I'd like to see it reach forward further than that, too." He pointed a finger at her. "Wouldn't you? You're part of the dynasty yourself, you know."

Sosia looked surprised. Then she nodded. "You're right. I am," she said, wonder in her voice.

Lanius knew why she looked surprised and sounded wondering. She thought of herself as part of Grus' family. Grus had wed her to Lanius not least so she could keep an eye on him. She would back him against Ortalis — he was sure of that. Nobody liked Ortalis, though (except Limosa, Lanius thought uneasily). But would Sosia back him against Grus?

That was the wrong question. The right question was, would it matter if she did? Lanius feared it wouldn't. A good thing, then, that he and Grus both aimed at Yozgat and not at each other.