The Chernagor Pirates

hand, he carried the box over to the table where he’d written most of How to Be a King. When he opened the box, he started to laugh. The Chernagors had made him happy with some of the cheapest presents ever given to a King of Avornis—a pair of moncats, a pair of monkeys, and a pile of documents dug out of a decrepit cathedral. For all he knew, merchants in the north country laughed whenever they heard his name.

He didn’t care. Happiness and having enough money weren’t the same thing. He’d been happy enough even at times when Grus squeezed him hardest. That money and happiness weren’t the same thing didn’t mean happiness had nothing to do with money. Lanius’ intuition, though, didn’t reach that far.

The first few parchments he unrolled and read had to do with the cathedral, not with anything that went on inside it. They included a letter from the yellow-robed high-hallow then presiding in the building asking a long-dead King of Avornis for funds to repair it and add to its mosaic decoration. The letter had come to the capital and gone back to what was then Argithea, not Durdevatz, with the king’s scribbled comment and signature below it. We are not made of silver, the sovereign had written. If the projects are worthy, surely your townsfolk will support them. If they are not, all the silver in the world will not make them so.

Lanius studied that with considerable admiration, “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” he murmured. He studied the response until he’d memorized it. He could think of so many places to use it.…

Other documents told him more about the history of Argithea than he’d ever known before. Some of them talked about the Chernagors as sea raiders. Up until then, he’d seen only a couple of parchments like that. They proved Argithea hadn’t been the first town along the coast of the Northern Sea to fall to the Chernagors. Lanius tried to remember whether he’d known that before. Try as he would, he couldn’t be sure.

More appeals—for money and for aid—to the capital followed, from the city governor and from the high- ranking priest at the cathedral. Only one of them had any sort of reply. A relieving force is on the way, the answer said. Hold out until it arrives.

There were no more letters in Avornan after the date of that one. The messenger bringing the answer must have managed to slip through the besieging Chernagors; Lanius had read elsewhere that they hadn’t been polished at the art of taking cities. Polished or not, though, they’d surely taken Argithea before the promised relieving force arrived. They must have kept the Avornans from recapturing the town, too. From then on, the history of Argithea ended and that of Durdevatz began.

One parchment still sat at the bottom of the box. Lanius pulled it out as much from a sense of duty as for any other reason. Since he was going through the documents, he thought he ought to go through all of them. He didn’t expect anything more interesting or exciting than what he’d already found.

But the first sentence caught and held his eye. I wonder why I have written this, it said, when no one is ever likely to read it, or to understand it if he does. After that, he couldn’t have stopped reading for anything. The author was a black-robed priest named Xenops. He had been consecrated the year before the Chernagors took Argithea out of the Kingdom of Avornis, and had stayed on at the cathedral under the town’s new masters for the next fifty years and more.

“Olor’s beard!” Lanius whispered. “This shows how Durdevatz passed from one world to the other.” He’d never imagined seeing such a document. In their early years in these parts, the Chernagors hadn’t written in Avornan or their own language or any other. And he had not thought any Avomans left behind in the north had set down what they’d seen and heard and felt. No such chronicles existed in the royal archives—he was sure of that. A moment later, he shook his head. One did now.

Xenops had caught moments in the transition from the old way of life to the new. He’d mocked the crude coins the Chernagors began to mint a generation after the fall of Argithea. Next to those of Avornis, they are ugly and irregular, he’d written. But new coins of Avornis come seldom if at all, while so many old ones are hoarded against hard times. Even these ugly things may be better than none.

Later, he’d noted the demise of Avornan in the market square. Besides me, only a few old grannies use it as a birthspeech nowadays, he said. Some of the younger folk can speak it after a fashion, but they prefer the conquerors’ barbarous jargon. Soon, only those who need Avornan in trade will know it at all.

Once, earlier, some of the Avornans left in the city had plotted to rejoin it to the kingdom from which it had been torn. The Chernagors discovered the plot and bloodily put it down. But none of them so much as looked toward me, Xenops wrote. Had they done so, they might have been surprised. I have been for so long invisible to the new lords of this town, though, that they cannot see me at all. Well, I know their deeds, regardless of whether they know mine.

That was interesting, to say the least. How deep in the conspiracy had Xenops been? Had he quietly started it and managed to survive unnoticed when it fell to pieces? The only evidence Lanius had—the only evidence he would ever have—lay before him now, and the priest did not go into detail. If someone had found and read his chronicle while he still lived in Durdevatz, he had said enough to hang himself, so why not more? Lanius knew he would never find out.

A chilling passage began, He calls himself a spark from the Fallen Star. Xenops went on to record how an emissary from the Banished One had come to Durdevatz even that long ago. He’d made a mistake—he’d gotten angry when the Chernagors didn’t fall down on their knees before him right away. I advised the lords of the Chernagors that such a one was not to be trusted, as he had shown by his own speech and deeds, Xenops wrote. They were persuaded, and sent him away unsuccessful.

How much did Avornis owe to this altogether unknown priest? If the Chernagors had fallen under the sway of the Banished One centuries earlier, how would the other city-states—how would Avornis— have fared? Not well, not when Avornis might have been trapped between the Banished Ones backers to north and south.

“Thank you, Xenops,” Lanius murmured. “You’ll get your due centuries later than you should have, but you’ll have it.” He could think of several passages in How to Be a King he would need to revise.

At the end of the long roll of parchment, Xenops wrote, Now, as I say, I am old. I have heard that the old always remember the time of their youth as the sweet summer of the world. I dare say it is true. But who could blame me for having that feeling myself? Before the barbarians came, Argithea was part of a wider world. Now it is alone, and I rarely hear what passes beyond its walls. The Chernagors do not even keep its name, but use some vile appellation of their own. Their speech drives out Avornan; even I have had to acquire it, however reluctantly I cough out its gutturals. The tongue I learned in my cradle gutters toward extinction. When I am gone — which will not be long — who here will know, much less care, what I have set down in this scroll? No one, I fear me— no one at all. If the gods be kind, let it pass through time until it comes into the hands of someone who will care for it in the reading as I have in the writing. King Olor, Queen Quelea, grant this your servants final prayer.

Tears stung Lanius’ eyes. “The gods heard you,” he whispered, though Xenops, of course, could not hear him. But how many centuries had Olor and Quelea taken to deliver the priest’s manuscript into the hands of someone who could appreciate it as it deserved? If they were going to answer Xenops’ last request, couldn’t they have done it sooner? Evidently not.

Was a prayer answered centuries after it was made truly answered at all? In one sense, Lanius supposed so. But the way the gods had chosen to respond did poor Xenops no good at all.

Lanius looked again at the long-dead priest’s closing words. No, Xenops hadn’t expected anyone in his lifetime could make sense of what he’d written. He’d merely hoped someone would someday. On reflection, the gods had given him what he’d asked for. Even so, Lanius would have been surprised if Xenops had thought his chronicle would have to wait so very long to find an audience.

But then, for all Xenops knew, the scroll might have stayed unread until time had its way with it. The priest must have thought that likely, as a matter of fact, for Avornan was a dying language in the town that had become Durdevatz. And, except among traders who used it for dealing with the Avornans farther south but not among themselves, it had died there. Yes, its getting here was a miracle, even if a slow one.

“A slow miracle.” Lanius spoke the words aloud, liking the way they felt in his mouth. But the Banished One