The Scepter's Return (36 page)

Pterocles said, “Otus has asked me to teach him his letters. I'm glad to do it.”

“I'm sure you would be,” Grus said, and then turned toward the freed thrall. “Why do you want to learn them? Most men born free can't read and write, you know.” There had been Kings of Avornis who needed to use a stencil to sign their names to decrees. Not all of them were bad kings, either.

“Fulca is a long way away now,” Otus said. “We can't talk anymore. If I am going to say anything to her, I have to say it with words I write down. Someone back at the palace will read them to her. She will say what she wants to answer, and someone will write it down.”

He
didn't want to dictate a letter. That gave Grus an idea. “Maybe Fulca will learn her letters, too,” he said.

Otus looked startled. Then he nodded, a nod that was almost a bow. “You're right, Your Majesty. Maybe she will. Learning things is good. I've seen that ever since I found out I could.”

“I'm glad,” Grus said. “I hope all the thralls will be like you and turn into ordinary people as soon as they can.”

“So do I,” Otus said. “The other king told me learning as much as I could was the most important thing I could do.”

“Did he?” Grus said. Otus solemnly nodded. Grus hid a smile. Lanius was a born scholar, so of course he thought that way. Grus wasn't sure Lanius was wrong, but he wouldn't have put it as strongly as the other king had.

“Freeing
all
the thralls will take a lot of wizardry,” Pterocles said. “We haven't come close to doing it, not yet. We won't for quite a while, either, even if we win all the fights.”

He was bound to be right about that, and he was wise to be cautious. What he said wasn't what Grus wanted to hear; the king wished everything were going smoothly, and that all the thralls would be free by day after tomorrow at the latest.

What he got two days later wasn't the freeing of all the thralls south of the Stura. Scouts came galloping back to the army from the south and southeast, shouting, “The Menteshe! The Menteshe are coming!”

“Well, well,” Hirundo said. “Maybe this is what we get for telling the Banished One's ambassador where to head in.”

“Maybe it is,” Grus said. “But I'd rather fight the nomads out in the open than have them stand siege in Yozgat.”

“A point,” Hirundo agreed. He shouted to the trumpeters. Horn calls blared out. The Avornans started shifting from columns into line of battle. Hirundo and Grus both shouted for them to hurry. If the Menteshe were moving forward as aggressively as that, the army needed to be ready when they got there. An attack before the Avornans were fully deployed was only too likely to turn into a disaster.

Hirundo also shouted for the engineers to get the stone- and dart-throwing engines into place as fast as they could. Grus echoed that cry, too. The engines could do what Avornan archery couldn't—they could outrange the nomads' fearsome horn-backed bows. If the Menteshe wanted to make the fight nothing but an archery duel, they would pay for it.

“Are these Korkut's men, or are they Sanjar's?” Grus asked a scout.

“I'm sorry, Your Majesty,” the man answered. “They just look like a bunch of howling barbarians to me.”

Grus laughed in spite of himself. “Well, by the gods in the heavens, we'll give them something to howl about, won't we?”

More scouts began falling back on the main body of the army. Some of them were wounded, and either lurched in the saddle or rode behind men who hadn't been hurt. Some, no doubt, wouldn't make it back at all.

Hirundo pointed ahead. “Here come the Menteshe.”

“There are enough of them, aren't there?” Grus said.

“Too many, if anybody wants to know what I think,” the general replied.

The plainsmen shouted something, but Grus couldn't make out what it was. He shrugged. They were unlikely to be welcoming him to the lands south of the Zabat. He did some shouting of his own. He and Hirundo both noted a hillock on their left flank, and posted a sizable detachment of archers and lancers there. That would make a good anchor for the left wing. On the right, the ground was far less generous. To make sure the Avornans didn't get outflanked there, Hirundo sent over a large fraction of the catapults. The great darts and flying stones would—with luck—keep the Menteshe from getting too adventurous over there.

“Nicely done,” Grus said. “If they have to come straight at us, it's our kind of fight.”

“That's what I'm hoping for, Your Majesty,” the general agreed. “The only thing wrong with the scheme is, the cursed Menteshe are liable to have hopes of their own.” He clucked in indignation that the nomads should presume to do anything so impolite.

Grus looked around to the royal guardsmen, who waited behind a screen of archers and other men more lightly armed and armored. If the Menteshe tried to smash through the Avornan center, they would get the same sort of unpleasant greeting as they had the last time they fought a large battle against Grus' army. Grus wondered whether any of the Menteshe commanders here had fought his men the summer before. That was something he wished he knew. It would have made a difference in his own dispositions.

Arrows began to fly. The first ones fell short, as happened in almost every battle Grus had ever seen. Men got more excited than they should have. They thought the enemy was closer than he really was, or thought they were stronger than they really were. Those wasted arrows mattered little. Soon enough, the shafts would bite.

And, soon enough, they
did
bite. Hit horses screamed. So did wounded men. Others crumpled to the ground without so much as a last sigh, dead before they struck it. In a way, they were the lucky ones. A quick death without pain was hardly more common on the battlefield than it was in the humdrum world of everyday life.

Hirundo bawled orders, shifting men to the right to cover what looked like building trouble there. The trumpeters' horn calls sent those orders winging even farther than his battle-trained voice could have. One of the trumpeters took an arrow in the arm even as he blared out a call. The music drowned in a horrible false note. Then the man lowered the horn and let out an honest shriek.

No sooner had Hirundo swung men to cover the perceived threat than he discovered that these Menteshe generals, whoever they were, had more imagination than the leaders he'd faced the year before. The perceived threat turned out not to be the real one. After luring Avornan reinforcements to the right, the nomads struck hard at the left, about halfway between the Avornan force on the hillock and the center.

For a moment, Hirundo and Grus seemed to be struggling to find out who could curse more foully. Grus had hoped his royal guardsman would hurtle forward and smash the nomads, as they'd done before. Now, with Hirundo sending the heavily armed and armored riders back and to the left, the king hoped the guardsmen could keep the Menteshe from smashing
his
army.

“Grus!” the guardsmen shouted as they spurred their horses forward. “Hurrah for King Grus!” That was flattering. The king would have liked it better had they not used his name for a war cry in such desperate straits.

The Menteshe poured a fierce volley of arrows into the guardsmen. Some of the Avornans fell from their horses with a clatter. Some of the horses went down, too. But armor for men and mounts proved its worth. The Menteshe didn't break the guardsmen's charge, as they'd plainly thought they would.

Because they didn't break it, they had to try to withstand it. Their ponies and the wax-boiled leather they used in place of chainmail were not up to opposing lancers on big, heavy horses. They fought bravely. Grus didn't think he'd ever seen the nomads fail to fight bravely; they would have been much less dangerous if they hadn't been brave. Brave or not, though, they couldn't keep the guardsmen from breaking the momentum of their advance.

When Grus saw that the Menteshe had stalled, he dared breathe again. With the nomads in his own army's rear, he'd feared his force would come unraveled like a poorly woven cloak. He began to think past mere survival. Pointing toward the hillock on the left, he said, “I wish we could get a messenger over there. If they hit the nomads from behind now …”

“I know,” the general answered. “I'll try if you like, but I don't think anybody can get through the Menteshe.”

Grus gauged the ground and grimaced. He feared Hirundo was right. He didn't want to send a man—or, more likely, several men—to death with no hope of success. But the battle hung in the balance. Part of being a king was doing things that needed doing, no matter how unpleasant they were. “I think you'd better—” he began.

He never finished giving the order. As they had not long before, he and Hirundo both cried out together. This time, though, they whooped with delight instead of shouting in anger and dismay. The officer in charge of the Avornans on the hill charged into the rear of the Menteshe without orders from anybody. Seeing what he ought to do, he went and did it.

He could hardly have timed the move better. The nomads had just discovered that they couldn't go forward anymore. Now they had enemy soldiers coming at them from behind, as they'd hoped to come at the Avornans. Thrown into confusion, they started streaming away toward the south. They were brave, yes, but they had never been much for taking a beating to no purpose.

“Push them!” Grus yelled. “Punish them! Make them sorry they ever tried to fight us! By the gods, they'd better be!”

The Avornans did what they could. It was less than Grus had hoped for, though not less than he'd expected. The Menteshe could flee faster than his men could pursue. They wore less armor to weigh them down. And they did not have to worry about keeping good order as they galloped away. The Avornans did, lest the nomads re-form and counterattack. A lot of the Menteshe, then, managed to escape.

“We beat them,” Hirundo said. “We drove them back.” He allowed himself a long, loud sigh of relief.

“We should have done more.” But Grus could not make himself sound too disappointed. They
had
won. They
had
driven the Menteshe back. “For a while there, I wasn't sure we were going to keep our heads above water.” That was putting it mildly.

“Me, too, Your Majesty.” Hirundo sighed again, this time theatrically. “When they broke through there … They had a better general than anyone we've seen in charge of them before. And, I'm afraid, the general we had could have done a better job.” He made a wry face.

“I'd be angrier at you if the nomads hadn't fooled me, too,” Grus said.

Hirundo shook a finger at him—a fussy, foolish sort of thing to see on a battlefield. “Aren't you paying me to be smarter than you are?”

“I suppose I am,” Grus admitted. “But we both got by with being stupid this time.” He paused. “We'll want prisoners, too, quite a few of them. I need to know who was in charge of the Menteshe, and who fought for him.”

“He was formidable, whoever he was,” Hirundo said.

Grus hadn't been thinking about the enemy general just then, though Hirundo was right. He'd been wondering about the overlord that general served. Had Sanjar's men attacked him? Had Korkut's? Or had their warriors joined forces, perhaps under the banner of the Banished One?

Avornan soldiers brought Menteshe prisoners before him. Some of the captives spoke Avornan. He used an interpreter to talk to the others. One by one, he asked them, “Which overlord do you follow?”

Some of them said, “Korkut.” Some said, “The Fallen Star.” And some said, “Sanjar.” That helped him very little.

He tried a different question, asking, “Which overlord commanded your army?”

Most of the Menteshe answered, “Bori-Bars,” which gave him the name of their general.

Then Grus asked, “Which prince does Bori-Bars serve?” Some of the nomads gave Sanjar's name, others Korkut's. Grus scratched his head. He didn't see how one general could serve both princes. For that matter, neither did the Menteshe. They shouted angrily at one another. Grus summoned Pterocles, wondering whether the wizard could get to the bottom of it.

Pterocles looked at the prisoners. He listened to them. He cocked his head to one side, intently studying them. He muttered under his breath. “I think I am going to have to try a spell,” he said. “This is … interesting.”

“Glad to intrigue you,” Grus said.

The spell the wizard used reminded Grus a little of the one he employed to free the thralls. It involved a clear crystal swinging on the end of a silver chain and flashes of light. These weren't rainbow flashes, though; they were sparks of clear green light, the color of freshly sprouted grass in bright spring sunshine. The Menteshe smiled as the sparks swirled around them.

Pterocles wasn't smiling; his face wore a mask of intense concentration. After he had used the spell on three or four nomads, he turned to Grus and said, “It's very interesting.”

“What is?” Grus asked, as he was surely meant to do.

“It's something less than thralldom and something more than nothing,” the wizard replied. “It makes the Menteshe … believe whatever they're told, you might say. They all heard that this Bori-Bars was against us and for their prince, and they didn't worry about who the prince might be. They all just followed Bori-Bars and made this attack on us.”

Grus whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Sounds like something the Banished One could deliver, doesn't it?”

“Well, I can't see anyone else who benefits more from it,” Pterocles said.

“Neither can I,” Grus said. “Is there a counterspell?”

“Maybe there is. I would have to work it out, though,” Pterocles replied. “We may not need one. You saw how these nomads started going at each other like a kettle of crabs when they realized they weren't one big happy army after all. What do you want to bet the same thing is happening in their camps right now?”