The Chernagor Pirates

sweep it away. And if the wind could have taken the rest of the white hairs with it, he would have been the happiest man in the world.

Time, Grus thought, and muttered under his breath. Time worked evils the Banished One couldn’t come close to matching. If Lanius and Grus himself alarmed the Banished One, all the exiled god really had to do was wait. Soon enough, they would be gone, and he could return to whatever schemes he’d had before they came to power. But he who had been Milvago was caught up in time, too, since he’d been cast down from the heavens to the material world. He might not be mortal in any ordinary sense of the word, but he too knew impatience, the sense that he couldn’t wait for things to happen, that he had to make them happen.

Because of that impatience, he sometimes struck too soon. Sometimes. Grus dared hope this was one of those times.

“Forward!” he called, and waved to the trumpeters. Their notes blared out the command. Forward the Avornan army went.

River galleys glided along the Anapus. As Grus and Hirundo had done when they first met, they could use soldiers on land and the galleys as hammer and anvil to smash the Menteshe. The nomads were vulnerable trying to cross rivers. There, the advantage of mobility they had over the Avornans broke down.

“Let’s push them,” Grus said. Hirundo nodded.

But the Menteshe didn’t feel like being pushed. Instead of riding south toward the river, they galloped off to east and west, parallel to the stream. And everywhere they went, new fires, new pyres, rose behind them. The Avornans slogged along behind them. The nomads lived off the country even as they ravaged it. Grus’ army remained partly tied to supply wagons.

And the Menteshe had plans of their own. Grus listened to drums talking back and forth through the night. He’d done that before, but now he understood some of what the drums were saying. If he understood them rightly, the nomads intended to smash his army between two of theirs.

When he said as much to Hirundo, the general nodded. “We’re trying to do the same to them, Your Majesty,” he said. “All depends on who manages to bring it off.”

“I know,” Grus said. “Let’s see if we can’t give them a little surprise, though, shall we? I don’t think they know yet that we can follow what the drums say.”

“We’d better make this win important, then,” Hirundo said. “Otherwise, we’ll have given away a secret without getting a good price for it.”

Grus hadn’t thought of that. He slowly nodded. Hirundo, as usual, made good sense. The king and the general put their heads together, trying to figure out how to turn what they knew into a real triumph. Grus liked the plan they hammered out.

Even so, it almost came to pieces at first light the next morning, because the Menteshe attacked sooner than Grus had thought they would. Arrows started arcing toward the Avornan army from east and west even before the sun cleared the eastern horizon. If the Avornans hadn’t pieced together what the drums were saying, his soldiers might have been caught still in their tents. As things were, not all of them had reached the positions he wanted by the time the fighting started.

But they’d done enough, especially in the east, where he wanted to hold the Menteshe. He had to delay his attack in the west until he had some confidence the east would hold. That meant the nomads peppered his men with arrows for an extra hour or so. But they didn’t push their attack as hard as they might have. Their main assault was supposed to be in the east. So the drums had said, and so it proved.

“Forward!” Grus shouted when everything was at least close to his liking. The Avornans’ horns wailed. The Menteshe probably understood horn calls the same way he understood their drum signals, but it didn’t matter here. The Avornans rode bigger horses and wore sturdier armor than the Menteshe. At close quarters, they had the edge on the nomads. And, because Prince Ulash’s men were so intent on their own plan, they’d come to close quarters.

They shouted in dismay when the iron-armored wedge of the Avornan army thundered at them, smashed their line, and hurled it aside. Grus struck out to right and left with his sword. A couple of times, it bit into flesh. More often, it kept one Menteshe or another from getting a good swipe at him.

When things went wrong, the nomads thought nothing of running away to try again some other time. Grus had expected that. This time, he tried to use it to his own purposes. He’d deployed outriders who shot at the nomads trying to escape to the north. The Menteshe, still surprised at the vigor of his response, recoiled from that direction and galloped south instead.

That was where he wanted them to go. Only when they drew close to the Anapus did they realize as much. They cried out in dismay again, for the river galleys waited there. Not only that, but the ships also landed marines who shot volley after volley of arrows into the Menteshe. And the catapults on the galleys kept the nomads from closing with the marines and riding them down. After darts from those catapults pinned two or three Menteshe to their horses and knocked several more off their mounts, Ulash’s riders didn’t want to go anywhere near the river.

Their other choice was charging at Grus and the men he led. That wasn’t the sort of fight they wanted, but desperation served where nothing else would. Shouting fiercely in their own language, the nomads swarmed toward the Avornan army.

A volley from the Menteshe made several Avornan horsemen pitch from the saddle and crumple to the ground. Wounded horses squealed and screamed. But soon the attacking Menteshe got close enough for Grus’ men to shoot back. And they did, with well-disciplined flights of arrows that tore into the invaders’ front ranks. “Grus! Grus! King Grus!” the Avornans cried.

Then it wasn’t just arrows anymore. It was swords and javelins and lances. It was men shouting and cursing and shrieking at the top of their lungs. It was iron belling off iron, iron striking sparks from iron, the hot iron stink of blood in the air. It was cut and hack and slash and thrust—and, for Grus, it was hoping he could stay alive.

He cut at a Menteshe. Along with a shirt of boiled leather that turned arrows almost as well as a mailcoat, the fellow wore a close-fitting iron cap. Grus’ blow jammed it down onto his forehead; the cut from the rim made blood run down into his eyes. He yammered in pain and yanked the iron cap back up with his left hand. But Grus struck again a heartbeat later. His sword crunched into the nomad’s cheek. He felt the blow all the way up into his shoulder. Face a gory mask, the Menteshe slid off over his horse’s tail.

Another nomad hacked at Grus. He managed to block the blow with his shield. He felt that one all the way to the shoulder, too, and knew his shield arm would be bruised and sore come morning. But if he hadn’t turned the blade aside, it would have bitten into his ribs. He hoped his mailshirt and the padding beneath would have kept it out of his vitals, but that wasn’t the sort of thing anybody wanted to find out the hard way.

An Avornan to Grus’ left engaged the Menteshe before he could slash at the king again. An arrow hissed past Grus’ head, the sound of its passage as malignant as a wasp’s buzz—and its sting, if it had struck home, far more deadly.

For a little while, he worried that the nomads’ fear and desperation would fire them to break through his battle line. But the Avornans held, and then began pushing Ulash’s riders back toward the Anapus regardless of whether they wanted to go that way. When the marines from the river galleys and the catapults on the ships began galling them again, they broke, riding off wildly in all directions.

“After them!” Grus croaked. He took a swig from his water bottle to lay the dust in his throat, then shouted out the command. Still crying out his name, the Avornans thundered after their foes. Some of the Menteshe got away, but many fell.

Hirundo was bleeding from a cut on the back of his sword hand. He didn’t even seem to know he had the wound. “Not bad, Your Majesty,” he said. “Not bad at all, by the gods. We hurt ’em bad this time.”

“Yes,” Grus said. “It’s only fair—they’ve done the same to us.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

King Lanius sat on the Diamond Throne. The weight of the royal crown was heavy on his head. His most