The Chernagor Pirates

Good question. He wished he had a good answer for it.

After some more curses—these less spirited than the ones that had gone before—he started looking. If he hadn’t put them where he thought, what was the next most likely place?

He was on his way over to it when something interrupted him. Ancient parchments—even ancient parchments from up in the Chernagor country—were unlikely to say, “Mrowr?”

“Oh, by the gods!” Lanius threw his hands in the air and fought down a strong urge to scream. “I haven’t got time to deal with you right now, Pouncer!”

“Mrowr?” the moncat said again. It didn’t care where the king had put the documents from Durdevatz. It had gotten out of its room again, and had probably also paid a call on the kitchens. The cooks had stopped up the one hole in the wall, but the moncat had found another. It liked visiting the kitchens—all sorts of interesting things were there. Who was going to deal with it if the king didn’t? Nobody, and Lanius knew it only too well.

These days, though, he had a weapon he hadn’t used before. Because he’d thought he knew where the parchments were, he was wearing a robe instead of the grubby clothes he often put on to dig through the archives, but he didn’t care. He lay down on the dusty floor and started thumping his chest with his right hand.

“Mrowr!” Pouncer came running. Lanius had trained the moncat to know what that sound meant— if I get up onto him, he’ll give me something good to eat. That was what Pouncer had to be thinking. The moncat was carrying a big, heavy silver spoon. Sure enough, the archives hadn’t been its first stop on its latest jaunt through the spaces between the palace’s walls.

“You’ve stolen something expensive this time. Congratulations,” Lanius said, stroking Pouncer under the chin and by the whiskers. Pouncer closed its eyes and stretched out its neck and rewarded him with a feline smile and a deep, rumbling purr. The moncat didn’t even seem offended that he hadn’t fed it anything.

He stood up, carefully cradling the animal in his arms. Pouncer kept acting remarkably happy. Lanius carried the moncat out of the archives and down the hall to the chamber where it lived—until it felt like escaping, anyhow. Pouncer didn’t fuss until he took the silver spoon away from it. Even then, it didn’t fuss too much. By now, it was used to and probably resigned to his taking prizes away from it.

Once Pouncer was back with the other moncats, Lanius brought the spoon to the kitchens. “You didn’t steal that yourself, Your Majesty!” Quiscula exclaimed when she saw what he carried. “That miserable creature’s been here again, and nobody even knew it.”

“Pouncer doesn’t think it’s a miserable creature,” Lanius told the pudgy cook. “Talented would probably be a better word.”

“Talented, foof!” Quiscula said. “Plenty of thieves on two legs are talented, too, and what happens to them when they get caught? Not half what they deserve, a lot of the time.”

“Thieves who go on two legs know the difference between right and wrong,” Lanius said. “The moncat doesn’t.” He paused. “I don’t think it does, anyhow.”

“A likely story,” Quiscula said. “It’s a wicked beast, and you can’t tell me any different, so don’t waste your breath trying.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.” Lanius held out the spoon. “Here. Take charge of this until Pouncer decides to steal it again.”

“Oh, you’re too generous to me, Your Majesty!” Quiscula played the coquette so well, she and Lanius both started laughing. She accepted the spoon from the king.

Lanius started back toward the archives, wondering if he would ever get to look for those parchments. Everything seemed to be conspiring against him. And everything, today, included Princess Limosa, who was carrying her baby down the corridor. “Hello, Your Majesty,” Limosa said. “Isn’t Capella the sweetest little thing you ever saw?”

“Well…” Lanius wondered how to answer that and stay truthful and polite at the same time. Truth won. He said, “If you don’t count Crex and Pitta, yes.”

Limosa stared at him, then giggled. “All right, that’s fair enough. Who doesn’t think their children are the most wonderful ones in the world?”

“I can’t think of anybody,” Lanius said. “That’s what keeps us from feeding our children to the hunting hounds, I suppose.”

Limosa’s eyes got even wider than they had been before. She hugged Capella a little tighter and hurried away as though she feared Lanius had some dreadful, contagious disease. He wondered why. He hadn’t said he wanted to feed Capella—or any other children—to hunting hounds. He sighed. Some people just didn’t listen.

He’d just started searching through the spots likeliest to hold the missing documents when somebody began banging on the door to the archives. The king said something pungent. The servants knew they weren’t supposed to do things like that. Bubulcus, the one who’d been most likely to “forget” such warnings, was dead. Either someone was making a dreadful mistake or something dreadful, something he really needed to know about, had just happened. Adding a few more choice phrases under his breath, he went to see who was bothering him in his sanctum.

“Sosia!” he said in astonishment. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

“I was going to ask you the same question,” his wife answered. “What on earth did you say to Limosa? Queen Quelea’s mercy, it’s frightened the life out of her, whatever it was.”

“Oh, by the gods!” Lanius clapped a hand to his forehead in exasperation altogether unfeigned. “She really doesn’t listen.” He spelled out exactly what he’d said to Limosa.

Even before he got halfway through, one of Sosia’s eyebrows started climbing. Lanius had seen that expression more often on Grus than on his wife. He liked it no better on her. Once he’d finished, she said, “Well, I don’t blame Limosa a bit. Poor thing! Hunting dogs, indeed! You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“You weren’t listening, either,” Lanius complained. “I didn’t say that was what we did with children. I didn’t say it was what we should do. I said it was what we would do if the people who had them didn’t think they were wonderful. Don’t you see the difference?”

“What I see is that nobody’s got any business talking about feeding babies to any hounds.” Sosia spoke with impressive certainty. “And that goes double for talking about babies and hounds to somebody who’s just had one. Had a baby, I mean.” She wagged a finger at him. “You’re not going to make me sound foolish. This is important.”

“I wasn’t. This is already nothing but foolishness,” Lanius said.

“It certainly is— your foolishness. Next time you see Limosa, you apologize to her, do you hear me?” Sosia didn’t wait for an answer. She stared past Lanius into the cavernous archives. “So this is where you spend all your time. I feel as though I’m looking at the other woman.”

“Don’t be silly,” Lanius said, although that comparison made much more sense to him than the other one had. “And I still don’t see why you want me to apologize to Limosa when I didn’t say anything bad to begin with.”

“Yes, you did. You’re just too—too logical to know it.” Sosia turned her back and stalked off. Over her shoulder, she added, “And if you think people run on logic all the time, you’d better think again.”

“I don’t think anything of the sort. People cured me of it a long time ago,” Lanius said plaintively. Sosia didn’t even slow down. She went around a corner and disappeared. The king almost chased after her to go on explaining. But he realized—logically—that it wouldn’t do him any good, and so he stayed where he was.

When he could no longer hear Sosia’s angry footsteps, he shut the door to the archives once more. For good measure, he barred it behind him. Then he went back to looking for the parchments from Durdevatz.

He searched on and off for four days, and finally found them by accident. If he had told Sosia about that, she would either have laughed at him or rolled her eyes in despair. He’d forgotten he’d put the parchments in a stout wooden box to keep them safe. How many times had he walked past it without paying it any mind? More than he wanted to think about—he was sure of that. If he hadn’t barked his knuckles on a corner of the box, he might never have found the documents at all.

That moment of sudden, unexpected pain made him take a long, reproachful look at the box. When he recognized it, he still felt reproachful—self-reproachful. After all that searching—and after its ludicrous end—he was almost afraid to look at the parchments. If they turned out to be worthless or dull, how could he stand it?

Of course, if he didn’t look at them, why had he gone to all the trouble of finding them? After rubbing his