The Scepter's Return (45 page)

Quailing, the wizard asked, “What are you going to do to me, Your Majesty?”

“I ought to give you a good kick in the backside for wasting my time,” the king answered. “Go on, though—get out of here. I've seen that you can cure thralls. Stick to that. If you want to tell tales, tell them to your grandchildren when you have some.” Chastened, the wizard hurried away.

Once he was gone, Grus called Hirundo and said, “I'm afraid we're going to have to do it the hard way.”

“I didn't really expect anything else, Your Majesty,” the general replied. “Did you?”

“Well, I hoped for something better, anyhow.” Grus eyed Yozgat's formidable defenses. “Breaking in won't be easy.”

“If it were easy, somebody would have done it a long time ago,” Hirundo said. “One way or another, we'll come up with something.”

As usual, Grus admired his optimism. Also as usual, the king had trouble matching it. But his own spirits rose when he got a letter from Lanius telling him Sosia was expecting another baby. Up there in the north, life went on. And one reason it went on was because of what he was doing down here. Even if he didn't take the Scepter of Mercy, the Menteshe would be too busy on their own soil to trouble Avornis for a long time to come.

Grus shook his head. That wasn't the right way to look at things. He was giving himself a comfortable excuse for failing. He didn't need that, and neither did the army. He hadn't come all the way down to Yozgat to fail. One way or another, he and the army
had
come up with something, again and again and again. Once more? Why not? Maybe Hirundo had the right idea after all.

But Grus also knew he hadn't been exaggerating or sounding a note of gloom and doom. Breaking into Yozgat
wouldn't
be easy. The city was well fortified, and the defenders seemed in good spirits—or maybe they just feared what the Banished One would do to them if they let the place fall. Either way, they weren't going to throw down their bows and their spears and surrender, however much he wished they would. He would have to get them out and get his men in.

“How?” he wondered aloud. He couldn't go under the moat—that seemed all too clear. His soldiers couldn't sprout wings and fly, either. He didn't even waste his time and Pterocles' asking about such impossibilities. That left storming the city, which wasn't impossible in the same sense of the word as the other two choices, but which didn't look very promising, either.

Or we can starve the Menteshe out
—
if we
can
starve them out,
Grus thought. He had no idea what his chances there were. He did know keeping his own army supplied would be none too easy. The nomads would do everything they could to disrupt grain shipments from the north. They would probably burn or trample as many nearby crops as they could, too.

If it were easy, somebody would have done it a long time ago.
Hirundo had grinned as he said that. Grus wasn't grinning. Taking Yozgat
wouldn't
be easy. He had to hope it wouldn't be impossible. More than that—he had to find a way to make sure it wasn't impossible.

At the moment, he had no idea what that way was.

Don't you think you should have had a better plan before you came this far?
he asked himself. The only answer he could come up with was,
I didn't expect Yozgat to be quite so tough.
That was true, but didn't seem good enough.

Inside Yozgat stood the formidable princely palace that also served as a citadel. Even if the city itself fell, the citadel could hold out for … well, who could guess how long? And the Scepter of Mercy … was in the citadel, of course. Where else would it be?

Grus shook his head. He'd come so far. He'd done so much. No King of Avornis since the Scepter was lost had even come close to what he'd done. Freeing so many thralls south of the Stura would complicate the nomads' lives for years to come, if not for generations. And yet, if he had to go back to the city of Avornis without the Scepter, he would have failed. That was why he'd come.

The Menteshe knew it, too. He could feel that. If he went home without the Scepter of Mercy, he would never see Yozgat again. He didn't know why he was so sure, but he was.
Now or never,
he thought unhappily.

Maybe this was what the Banished One wanted him to feel. Maybe the exiled god was trying to lure him into something foolish, something rash. Maybe—but he didn't think so. Something on the wind told him that whatever would happen would happen
soon.

He looked down at the hair on his arms. A lot of it had gone gray while he was looking in some other direction. Gray or not, though, it prickled up as though lightning were in the air. It also thought something important was on the way. Before this campaigning season was over, Avornis would have an answer.

A good answer? The right answer? For now, he had to hope so.

Marinus smiled up at Lanius and reached out with pink, chubby hands. Not for the first time, the king jerked his head back from the baby in a hurry.

Ortalis laughed at him, saying, “That's why I trim my beard closer than you do—less to hang on to.”

“My children don't grab and yank anymore,” Lanius said, though he'd worn it long even when they did.

“Ah, but you're going to have another one.” Ortalis looked at him sidelong. “Marinus there got you back into bed with my sister.”

“No,” Lanius said, though the answer to that was
yes.
He sent Ortalis a sidelong glance of his own. His was wary; for Ortalis to mention the succession even glancingly was out of the ordinary, and anything out of the ordinary was liable to be dangerous. Anything that had to do with Ortalis was also liable to be dangerous; he still steamed at how Grus' legitimate son had wounded him not long before.

Ortalis laughed again. Lanius would have preferred almost any other sound. The laugh tried to hide fear and mockery and scorn, and magnified them instead. “You or me?” Ortalis said. “Your son or my son?”

There it was, out in the open, naked and bleeding. Lanius tried to make light of it. His laugh was—he hoped—easier than his brother-in-law's. “I don't know why
we're
worrying about it,” he said. “Your father will have set it up to work the way
he
wants it to.”

He should have hated that idea. He wanted to be his own man, or at least to have the illusion that he was his own man. But the notion that Grus was firmly in charge held attractions, reassurances, of its own. It made him think of how things might have been if his own father had lived longer.

Slowly, Ortalis shook his head. Now he was the one who said, “No,” and he meant it with every fiber of his being. “No,” he repeated in a soft voice, but one no less certain for that. “My father is not going to run this. Once he's gone, by the gods, he's
gone.”

“What are we going to do about it, then?” Lanius asked. “I don't want to go to war with you. Whenever the kingdom has a civil war, it loses no matter who wins.”

“We'll settle it, the two of us,” Ortalis answered. But he didn't say how he thought they should settle it, or what sort of settlement it might be. Instead, he scooped up his baby son, who giggled. “My father won't have anything to do with it. Not a thing, you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Lanius said, almost as though he were gentling a wild animal. He felt that way. Ortalis seemed to think it was more important that Grus not be involved in the succession than who ended up succeeding. That made no sense to Lanius, but plainly it did to his brother-in-law.

“All right.” Ortalis breathed heavily, his nostrils flaring each time he inhaled. “That's how it's going to be.
We'll
take care of things.
He
won't.” He carried Marinus away.

Lanius was glad to see him go. Sweat trickled down the king's sides from his armpits. He hated confrontations. He didn't do them well, and he didn't relish fights or arguments of any kind. And this one …

What he'd wanted to scream at Ortalis was,
Not now! You thick-skulled dunderhead, not now! This isn't the time for these things. Wait until we know what happens in the south, for better or for worse.

Would Ortalis have listened if he'd shouted something like that? He didn't think so. Ortalis was a master of timing—of bad timing, that is. He saw what he wanted and he grabbed for it. He didn't think of anything past that.
Sometimes I wish I didn't, either,
Lanius thought.

He needed a while to realize Ortalis hadn't threatened him. Ortalis hadn't threatened Grus, either. He hadn't sounded friendly, but how could anyone sound friendly talking about the succession? All Grus' legitimate son had said was that he and Lanius would have to settle things after Grus was dead. How could anyone disagree with that?

When Lanius told Sosia what Ortalis said, her eyes lit up. She might have been Ortalis spotting a deer on the hunt. “Write that down and send it to my father,” she said. “Write it down just the way you told it to me. As soon as his orders get back here, Ortalis will end up in the Maze, and that will be that.”

“Why?” Lanius said. “It really was harmless.”

“If Ortalis is worrying about the succession, it's not harmless.” Sosia spoke with great conviction. “A scorpion couldn't be more dangerous. A snake couldn't be. Write to my father. He'll say the same thing.”

But Lanius shook his head. “Not now. He has more important things to worry about.”

“More important than this?” Sosia didn't believe a word of it.

“More important than this,” Lanius said firmly. “If the army is outside of Yozgat, that's more important than anything.” He started to say that Ortalis could overthrow him and the siege would still be more important. He started to, but he didn't.

Sosia looked down her nose at him even as things were. She looked very much like her brother then, which she didn't usually do. Lanius hated the thought, which didn't make it any less true. Now Sosia was the one who started to say something but didn't. He knew what it would have been—something rude about Pouncer. Ortalis would have said it. He
had
said it. Still, not hearing it but watching her think it hurt almost as much as her shouting it would have.

Lanius made himself shrug. He knew what he'd done. And he knew what he'd written to Grus. Now all he had to do was wait for the other king's reply—and hope it was the one he wanted to hear.

For once, Grus looked to the east, not the south. The walls of Yozgat dominated the horizon, all the more so when silhouetted against the lightening predawn sky. Everything seemed quiet on the walls. Grus had done everything he could to keep the Menteshe and the Banished One from learning when he would order an assault. He hadn't known himself. Every night before going to bed, he'd tossed two coins. On the night he first got two heads … That had been last night. He'd left his pavilion then, told Hirundo, “Tomorrow,” and gone back to get what sleep he could.

And now tomorrow was here.

He turned to Hirundo, who stood beside him. “Are we ready?”

“If we're not, it isn't because of anything we haven't done up until now,” the general answered. With each moment of growing light, the gilded armor he and Grus wore seemed to shine more brightly.

“Then let's go,” Grus said.

Nodding casually, Hirundo walked over to the trumpeters waiting nearby. He set a hand on the closest one's shoulder and spoke in a low, casual voice. The trumpeter and his comrades raised their horns to their lips and blew the call for the attack. A heartbeat later, other musicians all around the encirclement relayed the call to the waiting men.

The soldiers sprang into action as though they were performing some elaborate dance. Dart- and stone-throwers started shooting at the top of the wall, trying to clear the Menteshe from it. Archers ran forward to get into range and added ordinary arrows to the mix. Men flung hurdles into the moat, to give attackers and scaling ladders purchase for the assault on the walls.

“Let's go! Let's go!” sergeants screamed. “Keep moving, gods curse your stupid, empty heads!”

More slowly than they might have, the Menteshe realized Grus' men were trying to storm Yozgat. Their own horns rang out, on harsher, brassier notes than the ones Avornan trumpets used. Grus could hear their guttural shouts of alarm, and their own officers and underofficers shouting commands and advice probably not much different from what his men were using. Anyone who didn't hurry in an attack was liable to be in trouble, from the enemy or from his own side.

The thud of stones smacking against the wall was like a giant landing haymaker after haymaker. Engines groaned and clunked as artificers tugged on windlasses and loaded new stone balls and darts onto them. They clacked and swooshed and bucked when the missiles flew off against Yozgat.

“Forward the ladders!” Hirundo shouted.

Was it too soon? Had enough hurdles gone into the moat to support the ladders and the men who would climb them? Grus thought he would have waited a little longer before giving the command. But he also knew he might have been wrong. Hirundo had keen judgment for such things.

“Come on!” the king yelled. “You can do it!”

He hoped they could do it. Now the sun climbed up over the horizon, spilling light across the countryside. Avornans started swarming up a ladder. The Menteshe at the top of the wall pushed it over with a forked pole. The soldiers on it shrieked as they fell back to earth.

Heavy rocks crashed down on other climbing soldiers. The Menteshe greeted others with boiling water and red-hot sand. A few men gained a lodgement on top of the wall—but not for long. The defenders swarmed over them and overwhelmed them before they could be reinforced. Grus cursed. He knew he was too old to lead a charge up a ladder. He knew it, but he wished he were leading one just the same.