The Chernagor Pirates

He’d taken only a couple of steps before Gleb said, “Wait!” Hirundo paused, looking back toward the king.

“Why should he wait?” Grus asked. “You told us what your choice was, Your Highness. We’re willing to give you what you say you want. Carry on, Hirundo.”

“Wait!” Gleb said again, more urgently—almost frantically—this time. Again, Hirundo paused. Grus waved him on. Prince Gleb threw his hands in the air. “Stop, curse you! I was wrong. I’d rather pay.”

“The full sum?” Grus demanded. Now that he had Gleb over a barrel—one the Prince of Jobuka had brought out himself and then fallen over—he intended to take full advantage of it.

“Yes, the full sum,” Gleb said. “Just leave the crops alone!”

What did that say? That his storehouses were almost empty? Grus wouldn’t have been surprised. “Bring out the silver by this hour tomorrow,” the king told Gleb. “Otherwise…”

“I understood you,” Gleb said sourly. “You don’t need to worry about that, Your Majesty. I understood you very well.”

Having made the promise to pay, he kept it. Grus checked the silver even more closely than he had the money he’d gotten from Prince Lazutin. All of it proved good. He doubted any of the Chernagors would pay when he didn’t have an army at their doorstep, but he didn’t intend to lose a lot of sleep over it. He’d squeezed them plenty hard as things were. He left the encampment near the formidable walls of Jobuka and marched his army south.

“Are we heading for home, Your Majesty?” Hirundo asked in some surprise. “I thought we’d pay a call on Hrvace, too.”

“We will,” Grus said.

“But…” Hirundo pointed west. “It’s that way.”

“Thank you so very much,” Grus said, and the general winced. The king went on, “Before I turn west, I want to get Jobuka under the horizon. If Gleb sees me going that way, he’s liable to send a ship to Hrvace. It, could get there before we do, and that could let Prince Tvorimir set up an ambush.”

Hirundo bowed in the saddle. “Well, I can’t very well tell you you’re wrong, because you’re right. The only thing I will say is, Gleb’s liable to send that ship anyway. We ought to be ready for trouble.”

“So we should,” Grus said. “I trust you’ll make sure we are?”

“You’re a trusting soul, aren’t you?” the general replied.

King Grus laughed out loud at that. Maybe some Kings of Avornis had been trusting souls. Lanius was a dedicated antiquarian. He might know of one or two. Grus couldn’t think of any. If a trusting soul had somehow mounted the Avornan throne, he wouldn’t have lasted long.

Lanius knew he went to the archives like a lover to his beloved—the figure of speech Sosia had used held some truth. He would never have used it around her himself. It was too likely to stir up her suspicions.

Working on How to Be a King gave him a perfect excuse for poking through ancient documents. He laughed at himself. Oh, yes, I really need an excuse to get dusty.

He was looking for documents dealing with Thervingia during his fathers reign and the early years of his own—the days when King Dagipert had ruled the kingdom to the west, and when Dagipert had threatened to rule Avornis as well.

For the moment, Lanius wrote, Avornans do not often think of Thervingia. It is a quiet, peaceful land, not one to cause trouble or alarm here. But this has not always been so, nor is there any guarantee that it shall always be so. Time may reveal Thervingia once more as a frightful danger. This being so, my beloved son, you should know as much as possible about the bygone days when Thervingia threatened our very dynasty.

To Crex, those days would seem as distant as the time before the Menteshe seized the Scepter of Mercy. They were beyond his memory, and all times before one’s own memory ran together. But Lanius remembered them well, and hoped to give his son some hints about how to deal with Thervingia if it turned troublesome again.

Knowing how to deal with the Thervings meant knowing how Avornis had dealt with them in days gone by. So Lanius told himself, anyhow. It gave him a splendid excuse for going through the archives and reading old parchments.

How had his father and Grus dealt with Dagipert? Carefully, it seemed. Reading the letters Mergus and Grus and Arch-Hallow Bucco had exchanged with the King of Thervingia, it struck Lanius that Dagipert had had the upper hand more often than not. That wasn’t the way Lanius remembered things, but he’d been young and hadn’t been encouraged to worry about affairs of state. He’d assumed everything was all right, and in the end he hadn’t been wrong. But the road to the end had been rockier than he realized.

He started to write advice for how to deal with the Thervings when they had a strong king, then realized that was foolish. When Thervingia had a weak king, it wasn’t dangerous to Avornis. He was glad he’d avoided making a fresh muddle in the text. One of these days, a secretary would make a fair copy of this manuscript so Crex—and maybe others who came after Crex—could read it. Even without a new muddle, Lanius pitied that secretary. His own script was spidery, and the manuscript marred by scratch-outs, arrows sending what was written here to be placed there, words and sometimes sentences squeezed in between lines, and every other flaw that annoyed him when someone else committed it.

After putting down on parchment what was, in his judgment, the best way to keep Thervingia from causing trouble, he read over what he had written. If someone who really faced trouble from the Thervings read this, would it do him any good? Lanius found himself shrugging. He really didn’t know. He didn’t suppose it would hurt. That would have to do.

When he left the archives, he went to the moncats’ room. Several of the beasts came up to him in search of handouts. Like any cats, they liked him better when he had presents than when he didn’t. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t stop in the kitchens.”

They kept sending him slit-eyed, reproachful stares. He perched on a stool and watched them. After a little while, they seemed to forget he was there, and went back to scrambling on their framework of boards and branches, to eating from the bowls of meat that were always there for them, and to snuggling up not far from the braziers that kept their chamber warm. They were less sensitive to cold than his mustachioed monkeys, but they still enjoyed the heat from the braziers. He paid more attention to the moncats than to the monkeys these days, probably because the moncats got into more mischief.

He looked around for Pouncer. He at least half expected not to find the moncat. Would it be off in the kitchen stealing spoons, or had it gone off to the archives to hunt mice while he came here? But no, Pouncer lolled by a brazier, not quite asleep but not inclined to do much more than loll, either.

“You are a nuisance,” Lanius told the moncat. “You’re worse than a nuisance—you’re a pest.”

Praise of that sort seemed to be what Pouncer wanted most. The moncat rolled and stretched, all without going any farther from the warmth. Lanius laughed. Pouncer would be charming for as long as it cared to be, and not a heartbeat longer. Then it would go back to being a pest again.

He watched Pouncer. Pouncer watched him. After watching for a while, Pouncer decided it didn’t want to stay by the brazier anymore. It scrambled up the framework of boards and branches Lanius had had made so the moncats could feel more as though they were living in the forest. Two other moncats higher up on the framework squared off against each other, snarling and hissing. As usually happened, one of them intimidated the other, which backed down. Sometimes, though, they would fight.

When Lanius looked back to see what Pouncer was up to, he frowned and scratched his head. Where was the moncat?-He couldn’t find it.

He looked up and down the frame. He looked back toward the brazier. He looked all around the moncats’ chamber. Then, for good measure, he looked again. He rubbed his eyes and looked for a third time.

Pouncer had disappeared.

Lanius got up and examined the part of the frame where Pouncer had been the last time he paid any attention to the moncat. He also examined the wall behind the frame. It looked like the brickwork that made up much of the rest of the palace. As far as the king could tell, Pouncer might have dug a hole, jumped into it, and pulled the hole in after itself.