The Scepter's Return (18 page)

“It's a complicated place,” Grus answered. “Making things as simple as you can is good. Making them too simple isn't.”

“How do you tell the difference?” The general sounded genuinely curious.

“Well, if you start making a lot of mistakes, you probably think things are simpler than they really are,” Grus said.

Hirundo started to say something else. Before he could, a soldier ran toward Grus and him shouting, “Your Majesty! General! Your Majesty!”

“I don't know that I like the sound of that,” Hirundo said.

“I do know that I don't like it a bit. Something's gone wrong somewhere.” Grus raised his voice and waved to the soldier. “We're here. What is it?”

“Your Majesty, there's a good-sized Menteshe army coming up from the south,” the man replied.

“Well, we knew that was liable to happen,” Hirundo said.

“So we did,” Grus agreed. “We've done what we could to get ready for it, too. Now we get to see how good a job that was.”

“I'd better go out to the outer works and have a look for myself,” Hirundo said.

“I'll come, too,” the king told him. “If I start joggling your elbow, don't be shy about letting me know.”

“Everyone knows how shy and retiring I am, Your Majesty,” Hirundo replied. “People have been talking about it for years.” He didn't even try to pretend that Grus should take him seriously. He knew better. Grus didn't say anything. He just rolled his eyes and went along with the general.

He made sure trumpeters came with them, too. He didn't
know
what orders Hirundo would give, but he had a pretty good notion. Trumpeters would spread the word far faster than runners could.

The outer works, by now, were head-high, with a rammed-earth step for archers, pikemen, and observers. Grus got up on the step and peered south. Hirundo had gotten up there ahead of him. The approaching army was close enough to let the king see individual riders under the cloud of dust the mass of them kicked up.

“I wonder how serious they are,” he said.

“Well, I doubt they came here for a holiday,” Hirundo observed.

“Oh, so do I. But whether they make an attack and go away with their honor satisfied or really press it home … That makes a lot of difference,” Grus said. “What sort of sally the garrison inside Trabzun makes will be interesting, too.”

“There's one word for it.” Hirundo looked back over his shoulder toward the walls of the besieged city. “I think I'd better order the men into back-to-back. The other
interesting
question—that word again!—is whether we really do have enough men to hold the outer ring and the inner at the same time. Well, we'll find out, won't we?” He sounded lighthearted. If he'd sounded as worried as he felt … he probably would have sounded as worried as Grus felt, too.

The king made himself nod. He made himself seem calm while he did it, too. He said, “Yes, that seems to be what needs doing, all right.” Hirundo spoke to the trumpeters. They blared out the command. Other musicians all around the Avornans' ring took it up.

Swearing soldiers sprinted to their stations. Grus looked back toward Trabzun, as Hirundo had before him. He didn't see any sudden burst of activity from the defenders atop it. Of course, if the Menteshe commander inside the town had any brains, he wouldn't. The warriors in there would open a gate and storm out fighting without giving anything away beforehand. Grus knew that perfectly well. He eyed the town anyway. Not all commanders had brains. That, unfortunately, was just as true for Avornans as it was for Menteshe.

Something else occurred to him. He did some swearing of his own, then hurried off to find Pterocles. The wizard, as he'd expected, stood near the hole in the ground where the miners worked. “We may need your magic against the nomads outside,” Grus said. “Will your masking spell hold up for a while if you aren't there to keep an eye on it every minute?”

“Nomads outside?” Pterocles peered around in surprise. Up until that moment, the horn calls and the soldiers running back and forth had escaped his notice. He sent Grus an accusing stare. “Something is going on, isn't it?”

“Oh, you might say so,” the king answered. Since Pterocles plainly had no idea what, Grus filled him in with a few sentences, finishing,
“Can
you leave this by itself, or at least to a junior wizard?”

“Someone will need to keep it going.” Pterocles shouted, and kept shouting until another wizard came up. That took longer than Grus thought it should have; Pterocles didn't seem to be the only absentminded sorcerer who'd come south of the Stura. But Pterocles bowed when the other wizard was in place. “I am at your service, Your Majesty.”

“Come on, then.” Grus picked up a shield some foot soldier had forgotten. He tossed it to Pterocles, who caught it awkwardly. “Here. I expect you'll want this.”

By the expression on Pterocles' face, he'd never grabbed anything he wanted less. But, under Grus' stern eye, he didn't let go. Grus commandeered a shield for himself a moment later. Well before they got back to the outer palisade, arrows started coming down not far away from them. “Oh,” Pterocles said in what sounded like real surprise. “Now I understand.”

“I'm so glad,” Grus said. The look the sorcerer sent him was distinctly wounded. But he yelped like a puppy with a stepped-on tail when an arrow thudded into his shield. It might have gone by harmlessly had he not carried the round, bronze-faced wooden disk. On the other hand, it might not have. Grus gave back a sardonic nod. “You see?”

“Well, now that you mention it, yes,” Pterocles replied in an unusually small voice.

Hirundo pointed out toward the Menteshe. “So far, they're just riding around shooting at us. They won't do us much harm that way. We've hit a few of them, too, though their bows shoot farther than ours. But we'll start using the dart-throwers and stone-throwers on 'em any minute. By Olor's mighty fist, they can't outrange those, and I don't think they'll like 'em very much.”

He proved a good prophet. The engines began to buck and snap, sending their missiles farther and faster than any arrow could fly. A dart could pin a nomad's leg to his horse, or go right through him and pierce the man behind him. A twenty-pound stone ball would mash a man's head, or a horse's, to red rags. In moving out of range of such weapons, the Menteshe also moved out beyond their own ability to strike at the Avornans.

“If they want to give us trouble, they'll have to close with us.” Hirundo sounded somberly satisfied. “Otherwise, they can ride and whoop and holler as much as they please, but they're just a bunch of nuisances.”

Before Grus could answer, cries of alarm rose from the inner palisade. “A sally! A sally!” The king caught the news through the general din.

Menteshe were pouring out of the gates of Trabzun and swarming toward the palisade. Their guttural war cries filled the air. “Hold them!” Grus shouted to the men on the inner ring. “Don't let them get over!”

“Now we see how smart they are and how smooth they are. Can they hit us from inside and outside at the same time?” Hirundo might have been a scholar curious to see what someone else's students knew about his specialty.

Grus admired that detachment without wanting to imitate it. “If they can get over from inside and outside at the same time, we're in trouble,” he said.

“There is that,” Hirundo agreed. “We just have to make sure they can't, then, don't we?”

“Would be nice,” Grus said. Hirundo laughed merrily, as though they were a pair of tradesmen bantering back and forth in front of their shops. And so they were, but at the moment their trade involved bloodshed and slaughter. As though to underscore the point, an arrow thrummed past Grus' head. He jerked up his shield. That would have done him no good at all if the arrow had been a little better aimed.

He trotted toward the inner palisade, drawing his sword as he did. “It's the king!” Avornan soldiers called to one another. “The king is coming to help us!”

Grus laughed almost as hard as Hirundo had a moment earlier. He would fight if he had to. He hadn't been a bad swordsman when he was half his present age. He still knew what to do with a blade. His body, though, was less willing—no, less able—to do it than it had been thirty years before.

Pikemen, archers, and swordsmen were holding back the garrison of Trabzun. The ditch in front of the palisade also helped. Some of the Menteshe leaped down into it and then tried to scramble up over the palisade and into the Avornans' ring around their city. Most of them got shot or stabbed before they even came close to the top.

Grus had always thought that the Avornans knew more about attacking works than the nomads did. The Menteshe hadn't proved good at taking walled towns in southern Avornis during their last invasion. They'd destroyed crops around them and tried to starve them into submission. The few times they'd tried to storm them, they'd failed, and paid heavily for their failure.

Here, though, they knew what to do about the ditch—or some of them did. They threw brush hurdles into it and ran across those before the Avornans could set them on fire. Then they started trying to boost one another over the palisade. They had a much better chance of managing that from the hurdles than they did from the bottom of the ditch.

Now they could strike back at the Avornans. One of Grus' men fell, his face a gory mask from the sword stroke that had laid him low. A Menteshe scrambled over the palisade and inside. Several Avornans rushed at him. He went down before any other nomads could join him.

Even so, shouts from all around the inner ring warned that this wasn't the only place where the Menteshe were using those bound piles of brush to span the ditch. More cries rose from behind Grus. That could only mean the horsemen outside the ring were trying to break in, too. He wondered whether they'd also brought brushwood with them.
I'll find out,
he thought.

Meanwhile, more Menteshe made it over the inner palisade. Knots of cursing, shouting men battled one another. A nomad broke out of the nearest knot and rushed at Grus.

The nomad cut at his head. He blocked the blow. Sparks flew as iron belled off iron. The Menteshe slashed again. He had no style, but what seemed like endless youth and vigor. That might suffice, and Grus knew it.

Then another Avornan ran at the nomad. The Menteshe's face twisted in anger and fear. He didn't fancy facing two at once. He had no choice, though. Figuring—no doubt accurately—the young soldier was more dangerous than the frost-bearded king, he gave more of his attention to the new foe.

He likely would have beaten Grus without much trouble had they faced each other with no interference from other fighters. But he couldn't fend off the king with only a third or a quarter of his aim focused on him. Grus' sword went home below the nomad's right arm, a spot the fellow's boiled-leather corselet didn't protect. The Menteshe howled like a wolf. The pain of the wound distracted him, and the other Avornan's sword bit into his neck. He swayed, blood spurting from the wound, and then crumpled.

“We make a good team, Your Majesty,” the Avornan soldier said.

“So we do,” Grus replied. “Tell me your name.”

“I'm called Esacus, Your Majesty.”

“Esacus,” Grus repeated, fixing the name in his mind. “Well, Esacus, you'll have a reward when all this is done.”

“Thank you very much, but I didn't do it for that,” the soldier said.

“Which makes you more deserving, not less,” Grus told him. Esacus scratched his head, plainly not understanding. That proved he'd never had anything to do with the royal court. People there were apt to act much more heroic if they thought the king's eye was on them than they might have otherwise.

“You stay back, Your Majesty,” Esacus called as more Menteshe made it over the palisade. Shouting, “Avornis!” the soldier rushed into the fight.

Grus did stay back. He knew good advice when he heard it. The Menteshe couldn't get enough men within the Avornan ring at the same time to give the defenders too much trouble.

The nomads were also trying to break into the palisaded ring from the outside. Despite the barrage of arrows they rained on the defenders, they weren't having much luck. They must have hoped that barrage would break the Avornans, which would give them the chance they needed to force an entry. Unlike the Menteshe inside Trabzun, the relief force hadn't brought any hurdles or other ways to cross the ditch and come to grips with Grus' men at close quarters.

They were brave. Like anything else, bravery didn't matter so much without the talent that would have supported it. If anything, it made the nomads take heavier losses than they would have with less courage. They kept on attacking even when the attacks couldn't succeed—and they paid for it.

At last, they had taken as much as they could take. They gave up trying to force their way into the ring. A few at a time, they began to ride off. Some lingered to keep on shooting at the Avornans from beyond the range where Grus' archers could respond. Then a stone flung from an engine knocked a chieftain out of the saddle—and knocked over his horse, too. After that, the nomads seemed to decide they'd had enough. The men who'd lingered rode away after their comrades.

Grus ordered some of the Avornans from the outer works to go to the aid of the men who were fighting off the much more stubborn attack on the inner ones. When the Menteshe trying to break out of Trabzun saw that the Avornans battling them were being reinforced, they sullenly drew back into the city—those who could, at any rate.

Later, the king realized he should have tried to force an entry then. The Menteshe were in disarray, and the gates had to stay open for a while to let them back within the walls. But the nomads, though they hadn't won, had fought well—well enough to rock the Avornans back on their heels. Grus did not issue the order. Neither did Hirundo. No one pursued the Menteshe as they retreated.