The Chernagor Pirates

boarders! If we stick fast when we ram, they’ll swarm down onto us.”

More and more arrows flew from the pirate ships. Grus had never had to worry about so many in a river battle; he might almost have been fighting on land. A couple of rowers were hit. That fouled the stroke. The oarmaster screamed curses until the wounded men were dragged from their benches and replaced. Archers at the bows of the river galleys were shooting along with the Chernagors, emptying their quivers as fast as they could. A pirate threw up his hands and splashed into the Granicus, an arrow through his throat.

The oarmaster upped the stroke again, this time without waiting for a command from Grus. The steersman aimed the bronze-tipped ram at the planking just to port of the bow of a pirate ship. Where everything had seemed to move slowly before, all at once the pirate ship swelled enormously.

“Brace yourselves!” Grus shouted just before the collision.

Crunch! The ram bit. Grus staggered but kept his feet. “Back oars!” the oarmaster screamed. The rowers did, with all the strength they had in them. If the ram did stick fast in the pirate’s timbers, the Chernagors would board and slaughter them.

“Olor be praised!” Grus gasped when the river galley pulled free. The pointed ram had torn a hole two feet wide in the pirate ship, just below the waterline. The Granicus flooded in. The extra weight, growing every moment, slowed the ship to a crawl.

“Ram ’em again, sir?” the steersman asked.

Grus shook his head. “No. We got enough of what we needed.” He would have done far more damage striking another river galley. The Chernagor ships, built to withstand long voyages and pounding ocean waves, were even more strongly made than he’d expected.

He looked around to see how the rest of the fight was going. One pirate ship had ridden up and over the luckless river galley that tried to ram it. Avornans, some clutching oars, splashed in the Granicus. Another Chernagor ship traded archery with three river galleys. Two more pirate ships besides the one Grus had struck had been rammed, and were taking on water. One pirate ship was afire. A river galley burned, too—the Chernagors had flung jars of oil lit with wicks down onto its deck. More Avornans went into the river. So did Chernagors from the northerners’ burning ship. Grus wondered whether they’d set themselves ablaze. Savagely, he hoped so.

He pointed to the ship that had defeated one ramming attempt. “Turn about!” he called to the steersman. “We’ll get ’em in the rear.”

“Right!” The steersman threw back his head and laughed. “Just what they deserve, too, Your Majesty.”

How the Chernagors on the pirate ship howled as the sharp-beaked river galley sped toward its stern! They sent a blizzard of arrows at Grus, who wished he wore something less conspicuous. He wanted to go below, but that would have made him look like a coward in front of his men. The things we do for pride, he thought as an arrow stood thrilling in the river galley’s deck a few inches in front of his boot.

Crunch! Again, the river galley shuddered as the ram struck home. Again, the oarmaster bellowed, “Back oars!” Again, the rowers pulled like men possessed. Again, Grus breathed a sigh of relief when the ram did pull free.

This time, though, the Chernagor ship didn’t sink. The skipper ran her aground in the shallows before she filled too much and became altogether unmanageable. Pirates leaped off her and splashed ashore. Grus knew he would have to land men, too. The galleys had outpaced other forces following on the river and by land. If all the pirates had taken to their heels through the fields, they would have been very troublesome. The survivors from one ship? Probably not.

Hirundo seemed to think along the same lines. “Not too bad, Your Majesty,” he said.

“No, not too,” Grus agreed. “Not yet. But we’ve only just started cleaning them out. This is the first bunch we’ve run into, and maybe the smallest.”

Hirundo made a horrible face. Then, very reluctantly, he nodded.

King Lanius sat in the royal archives, delightfully encased in quiet. More dust motes than usual danced in the sunbeams that pushed through the dirty skylights overhead. Lanius had been shoving boxes around again, looking for interesting things he hadn’t seen before. He often did that. He didn’t often get rewarded as handsomely as he had this time.

He had to stop and think how long ago King Cathartes had reigned. Seven hundred years ago? Eight hundred? Something like that. Cathartes hadn’t spent an especially long time on the Diamond Throne, nor had his reign been distinguished. But, like all Kings of Avornis until the Menteshe stole it, he’d wielded the Scepter of Mercy. Unlike most of them, he’d worked hard to describe what that was like.

Without both patience and luck, Lanius never would have come across the time-yellowed scrap of parchment. Patience encompassed the labor of digging out new boxes of documents and the different but even more wearing labor of going through them one by one to see what each was. Luck came in when King Cathartes’ letter got stuck by fragments of wax from its seal to a much less interesting report on sheep farming in the Granicus valley that was only a quarter as old. If Lanius hadn’t been paying attention, he would have put the report on wool and mutton aside without noticing it had another document riding on its back.

King Cathartes’ script looked strange, but Lanius could puzzle it out. The language was old-fashioned, but not impossibly so. And Cathartes was talking about something that fascinated Lanius, so the present king worked especially hard. Oft have men of me inquired, What feel you? What think you? on laying hold of the most excellent Scepter. Hath it the massiness of some great burthen in your hand, as seemingly it needs must, being of size not inconsiderable? Let all know, as others have said aforetimes, a man seizing the Scepter of Mercy in the cause of righteousness is in sooth likewise seized by the same.

Lanius wondered what the cause of righteousness was, and how any man, let alone a King of Avornis holding the Scepter of Mercy, could know he was following it. Did Cathartes mean the Scepter gave some sign of what was right and what wasn’t? Perhaps he did, for he went on, Know that, when rightly wielded, the Scepter weigheth in the hand, not naught — for that were, methinks, a thing impossible e’en mongst the gods — but very little, such that a puling babe, purposing to lift it for the said righteous cause, would find neither hindrance nor impediment.

But if a man depart from that which is good, if he purpose the use of the aforesaid Scepter of Mercy in a cause unjust, then will he find he may not lift it at all, but is prevented from all his ends, Cathartes wrote.

“Well, well,” Lanius murmured. “Isn’t that interesting?” It wasn’t just interesting. It was new, and he’d almost despaired of finding anything new about the Scepter of Mercy. Most Kings of Avornis who’d written about it at all had been maddeningly vague, insisting the wielding of the Scepter was a matter of touch without ever explaining how. Cathartes had been far more forthcoming.

It also explained far more than Cathartes could have dreamed. For four hundred years, the Scepter of Mercy had lain in Yozgat. In all that time, so far as Lanius knew, the Banished One had never picked it up and used its powers against his foes. Like all Avornan kings over those four centuries, Lanius was glad the Banished One hadn’t, but he’d never understood why not. Now, perhaps, he did. After the Menteshe brought it back to him, had he tried to lift it, tried and failed? No proof, of course. But it seemed more reasonable to Lanius than any other idea he’d ever had along those lines.

Maybe it meant even more than that. Maybe it meant the gods had been justified in casting Milvago down from the heavens, making him into the Banished One. Didn’t it argue that his goal of forcing his way back into the heavens was anything but righteous? Or did it just say their magic rejected him even as they had themselves?

Lanius laughed. How am I, one mortal man sitting by himself in these dusty archives, supposed to figure out all the workings of the gods? If that wasn’t unmitigated gall, he couldn’t imagine what would be.

He wished he could talk with Grus about it. That failing, he wished Avornis had an arch-hallow whose passion was learning about and seeking to understand the gods, not tracking down a deer after he’d put an arrow in its side. Lanius might have trusted such an arch-hallow with the terrifying secret of Milvago. Anser? No. However much Lanius liked Grus’ bastard, he knew he was a lightweight.

He even understood why Grus had chosen to invest Anser with the red robe. Anser was unshakably loyal to