The Scepter's Return (38 page)

When he got to his feet, dust spilled off him and made a little cloud around him. Soldiers were stirring, and stirring up the dust. Grus coughed. He spat—and spat brown. He felt as though he were covered with bugs. He might have been, but suspected it was grit and dust instead.

Hirundo uncocooned himself from his blanket and looked around. Even though he'd been entirely wrapped up, his face and beard were the same yellow-gray that filled the rest of the landscape. Seeing that, Grus suspected he was also the color of dirt—almost the color of a corpse.

As Grus had, Hirundo spat. He looked revolted when his spittle too proved brown. “Well,” he said in tones of forced—and false—gaiety,
“that
was fun.”

“Wasn't it just?” Grus said. “A little more, and it would have swallowed us up.”

“Not the way I plan to go.” Hirundo coughed again. Dust spurted from his nostrils when he did.

“And how
do
you plan to go?” Grus inquired. The inside of his mouth tasted like dirt. He swigged from the canteen of watered wine he wore on his belt, then spat again. Even after that, his mouth still felt gritty.

“Me?” Hirundo grinned. “I intend to be murdered by an outraged husband at the age of a hundred and three. It will be a great scandal, I promise.” He sounded as though he looked forward to it.

“There are worse ways to go,” Grus said. “I'll help spread the gossip after it happens, I promise.”

“Oh, who'd listen to you?” Hirundo said scornfully. “You'd be nothing but an old man.”

They both laughed. Part of the laughter was relief. They'd brushed up against disaster with the sandstorm, and they both knew it. Grus stared south. The haze and dust still floating in the air hid the Argolid Mountains. Was the Banished One pleased with what he'd just accomplished, or was he disappointed he hadn't managed more? He still might manage more, of course (Grus assumed the storm was his, for it seemed too nasty to have been natural). He might send more wind and dust and sand. Or …

“We'll need scouts out,” Grus said. “The Menteshe may try to pay us an early morning visit.”

“So they may,” Hirundo agreed. “Don't worry, Your Majesty. I'll take care of it.”

By then, lots of Avornans were coughing and spitting and rubbing their eyes and cursing the storm and putting more dust in the air every time they moved. When scouts trotted off to take their positions all around the army, their horses kicked up more dust still. “How will we see the Menteshe even if they're there?” Grus wondered.

“I don't know.” Hirundo didn't sound worried. “We'll see them the same way they see us, I expect.”

“The same way …? Oh,” Grus said. Any nomads close enough to attack would also have been close enough to get caught in the storm themselves.

Still more dust surrounded the soldiers as they began to move. They went right on grumbling and coughing and wheezing. Grus wondered what the storm had done to the crops growing around here. True, grain came up in the winter in these parts, to take advantage of what rain fell. But vines and olives and almonds grew through the summertime. Could they ripen the way they should if they were covered in dust? Could livestock find enough to eat if sand and dust buried grass? He didn't know. Before long, he would start finding out.

Pterocles had a similar thought. Steering his mule up close to Grus' horse, the wizard said, “I wonder what the thralls make of all this.”

“Probably about what their cattle do,” Grus answered. “You're talking about the ones that hadn't been freed?”

“Well, yes,” Pterocles said. “The others are just … people.”

“Just people,” Grus repeated. It wasn't that Pterocles was wrong. It was, in fact, that he was right, and that being right was so important. “Who would have thought a couple of years ago that we would have freed thralls by the thousands? You've done something marvelous, you and all the other wizards.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Pterocles said. “Up in the Chernagor country, the Banished One tried his best to make sure I never got the chance to do anything ever again. What I've done here—what we've done here—is the best way I know to pay him back.”

“It's good, all right,” Grus agreed. “But I can think of one thing better still.” He looked south toward Yozgat as he spoke.

Surrounded by beaters and royal guardsmen, Lanius and Arch-Hallow Anser rode to the hunt. Lanius said, “I hope everything is all right with Ortalis. I worry when he doesn't feel like hunting.”

“I think it's just us he doesn't feel like hunting with today,” Anser said. “He went out with some friends of his own the other day.”

“Did he? I didn't know that,” Lanius said. The idea that Ortalis might have friends faintly bemused him. “Who were they? Do you know?”

“Not exactly,” Anser replied. “I can't name names, if that's what you mean. Guard officers—nobody too important, though.”

“Isn't that interesting,” Lanius said, which was normally polite and neutral and nothing more. It was still polite and neutral, but it also
was
interesting. Maybe a fondness for hunting explained why Ortalis congregated with some guard officers and not others.

Then Anser said, “I didn't even know some of them liked to hunt.”

Lanius scratched his head. In that case, he
didn't
know what Ortalis' choice of companions meant. Did that make it more interesting, or less? One more thing the king didn't know. It gave him something to think about.

A bird somewhere up in an oak tree screeched. “That's a jay,” Lanius said.

“So it is,” Anser agreed. “You wouldn't have known what it was before we started hunting.”

“I've learned quite a bit,” Lanius said, which was also true and polite.

It turned out not to be polite enough. Chuckling, Anser said, “Some of the things you've learned, you probably wish you hadn't. But that's all right—Ortalis isn't with us today.”

If even Anser joked about his half brother … “What must the servants think?” Lanius said.

“Servants never think anything good about you.” If Ortalis had said that, he would have sounded angry—but then, Ortalis often sounded angry. Anser just thought it was funny. He went on, “You know what they say—nobody's a hero to his own servants.”

“No, I suppose not.”
What do the servants think of
me? Lanius wondered.

He knew he was fairly mild, fairly easygoing. Grus was stricter; by what some of the servants who'd been around the palace forever said, his own father had been much stricter. But what did they really think of the way he spent so much time in the archives and with his animals? Even more to the point, what did they really think of the way he took mistresses from among their ranks? What did they say about him behind his back?

Well, he's nice to them, mostly. He doesn't hurt them, the way Ortalis would. That's something, anyhow. And when he gets tired of them or his wife finds out, he doesn't leave 'em flat. He could be worse, I expect.

The king heard an imaginary servant inside his own head so vividly, he turned to see if a real one were in earshot. Of course he didn't see anyone of the sort, so he felt foolish. But his best guess about the servants' gossip had seemed impressively real. He didn't think he was very far wrong, anyway.
He could be worse.
Servants could say worse things.

Anser had been chasing the same game, but down a different track. “Do you want the help complaining that you never bring any meat back to the palace, Your Majesty?” he said with a sly smile. “If you don't, maybe you ought to learn to shoot a little straighter.”

Did the people in the palace, and especially the people in the kitchens, complain or laugh because Lanius came home empty-handed so often? That hadn't occurred to him, either, but odds were they did. “Oh, well,” he said. “If I have to be an archer to lead Avornis, the kingdom is in trouble.”

The king and the arch-hallow teased each other until they got to the woods. Lanius would have been happy to go on joking there, but Anser took hunting much more seriously than he took his ecclesiastical post. He wore the red robe because Grus wanted him to, but he went after deer because
he
wanted to.

Silent as usual, the beaters vanished among the oaks and beeches. Anser headed for the edge of a familiar clearing. Lanius followed. He would have to do some shooting before too long, and, as usual, he didn't look forward to it.
You can condemn a man to death and then go off and eat supper without a second thought. Why can't you shoot a stag?

The stag hasn't done anything wrong. And I don't have to kill the man myself,
he thought. Were those reasons enough? Evidently.

“Are you going to try to hit something this time, Your Majesty?” Anser asked, his voice quiet and amused.

Lanius felt almost as embarrassed as he had when Sosia first found out about his affairs with serving girls. “How long have you known?” the king asked.

“Quite a while now,” Anser told him. “Nobody could be quite as bad a shot as you are unless he did it on purpose. It just isn't possible. How
did
you kill that one stag?”

“I didn't mean to.” Confession felt oddly liberating to Lanius. “He—ran into my arrow, I guess you'd say.”

“Why do you come out if you don't want to shoot anything?” the arch-hallow inquired.

“Must be the company I keep,” Lanius replied.

Anser looked sharply at him, suspecting irony. Finding none, he said, “You don't need to do that, Your Majesty. I'd still like you if you didn't.”

“Thank you.” Lanius meant it from the bottom of his heart. “But haven't you ever gone out of the way for a friend?”

“I don't know that I've ever gone
that
far out of the way,” Anser said thoughtfully. “You don't ask me to go pawing through the archives with you.”

“It's different,” said Lanius, who would not have wanted Grus' bastard—or anyone else except maybe the late Ixoreus, who'd loved them as much as he did—pawing through the archives with him. “You wouldn't have a good time in the archives because you don't care what's in them. I can enjoy the woods whether I shoot anything or not. It's nice out here. It's just dusty in the archives.”

The arch-hallow laughed. “All right, Your Majesty. I'll take your word for it—and I won't tell Ortalis, either. Do you want to bother shooting at all?”

After a moment's thought, Lanius nodded. “Yes, I think I'd better. Otherwise the guards and the beaters would talk, and that wouldn't be so good. You can go on giving me a hard time when I miss, too.”

“All right. I will.” Anser laughed again. Then, genuine curiosity in his voice, he asked, “How bad a shot are you really?”

“I don't know,” Lanius answered. “I'm not very good, but I'm not as bad as I pretend to be, either. It's not something I need to know how to do, you know.”

“No, I suppose not. Things stay in one place in the archives, don't they? You don't have to put arrows in them to make them hold still.”

Remembering how some of the documents he'd looked for hadn't stayed where he thought they belonged, Lanius wondered about that. But he said, “I suppose not.” The documents hadn't gone wandering. His attention had.

A stag bounded into the clearing. “Your shot, Your Majesty,” Anser sang out, as though they hadn't been talking about Lanius' fraudulent hunting. The king nocked an arrow and let fly. The arrow—what a surprise!—went wide. The stag dashed off. “Oh, too bad, Your Majesty!” Anser exclaimed. He was a good actor.

“You shoot first the next time.” Lanius did his best to seem disappointed. “Maybe you'll have better luck.”

“Maybe I will. I can hope so, anyhow.” Anser sounded amused.

He killed a stag about an hour later, and butchered it as it lay on the ground. He did a good, careful job, but showed none of the relish for it that raised Lanius' hackles when Ortalis had a knife in his hand. One of the beaters started a small fire. Anser roasted and ate the mountain oysters himself, but shared the liver, kidneys, sweetbreads, and heart with Lanius and the beaters and guardsmen.

Lanius couldn't deny that very fresh meat cooked over open flames was, in its way, better than most of what the cooks made. These slices needed only a little salt to bring out their full flavor. A lot of the palace dishes were spicy enough to make someone's eyes water. Partly that was because spices were expensive, and so suited to a king's table. And partly it was because those spices helped disguise the taste of meat that was starting to go off.

And then there was a crashing in the woods, and a loud, deep grunt, and a shout of, “Boar! Boar!”

The hunters all leaped to their feet and grabbed for their weapons. Wild boar were the most dangerous beasts in the woods. Their tushes could gut a man as easily as a knife gutted a deer. Some of the guards had boar spears, with a crosspiece on the shaft to keep a boar from running up it and savaging the spearman despite being wounded.

More yells said the beaters were trying to head off the boar and keep it away from Lanius and Anser. But the crashing came closer with terrifying speed. The boar sounded like an angry common pig when it squealed, or what a common pig would have sounded like if it were much larger and fiercer than it really was.

And then, fast as a stone flung from a catapult, the boar was upon them. An arrow stood in its shoulder, but seemed only to enrage it. Its little eyes were red as blood. Its head swung until it aimed straight at Lanius. Then it charged.

Two guards managed to spring between the boar and the king. One of the men went down. The boar lowered its head and slashed at him with its tushes. The other guardsman drove his spear home and hung on for dear life. The boar screamed and kept trying to break free.