Harry Turtledove - The Scepter's return

The air was full of the rich greenness of growing things. Had the breeze blown from the other direction, it would have carried the smoke and stinks of the artisans' encampment, an odor much more like those usual in the city of Avornis.

Some of the workmen washed in the stream that ran by the encampment. Some of them splashed one another to fight the late-summer heat or just to have a good time. They whooped and hollered as they played. Lanius sighed. The foolishness looked like fun, but it wasn't the sort of fun in which a king could indulge. All he could do was watch and be wistful.

"Here comes Tinamus, Your Majesty," the guard said.

"Well, good," Lanius said. "I was going to want to talk to him today."

Tinamus bowed to the king. "Good morning, Your Majesty," he said. "Everything here seems to be going very well. No builder could ask for a more generous client. The only thing I wish is…" His voice trailed away.

"Yes?" Lanius knew what Tinamus wanted. Grus would have been able to make that yes so intimidating, Tinamus never would have had the nerve to come out and say it. Grus was made of fabric coarser than Lanius, and really was as tough as he sounded. Lanius wasn't particularly tough, and couldn't sound as though he were.

Proof of that was his utter failure to intimidate Tinamus. The architect went right on with what he'd been at the point of saying. "What I wish, Your Majesty, is that I had some notion of what all this is for."

If Lanius couldn't sound severe, maybe he could look that way. His eyebrows came down. He pursed his lips and frowned. If his father had made a face like that, anyone who saw it would have quaked in his boots. By all accounts, King Mergus had been as tough as a boot. Lanius still didn't seem to impress Tinamus very much. He said, "We've been over this ground before. The less you know, the better off you are."

"So you've said." Tinamus looked as unhappy as he sounded. "You understand that drives me wild, I'm sure. If you tell a baker to make you one thin slice of cake, don't you think he'll wonder why?"

"If I paid a baker what I'm paying you, he wouldn't have any business asking questions," Lanius answered.

"Well, maybe not," the builder said. "But a baker's slice of cake would be gone in a hurry. What I'm doing here could last for the next five hundred years. People will look at it and say, 'This is how Tinamus wasted his time?' "

"You're not wasting your time. Whatever else you're doing, you're not doing that," Lanius assured him.

"What am I doing, then?"

"Do you really want to know?" Lanius asked. Tinamus nodded eagerly. The king smiled and said, "You're building a fancy run for one of my moncats."

Tinamus gave him a stiff bow. "If you'll excuse me, Your Majesty, I'll go away now. Perhaps one day you'll be serious, or you'll decide that I am." He bowed again and stalked off.

Lanius looked after him, then quietly started to laugh. Sometimes the worst thing you could do to someone was to tell him the exact and literal truth. Unless the King missed his guess, Tinamus wouldn't come troubling him with more questions for a long, long time — which was exactly what he'd had in mind.

Grus looked at the river with something less than delight. It was narrow and shallow, not really the sort of barrier between his men and the Menteshe that he'd had in mind. Mud by the riverside sent up a nasty smell as it dried in the sun. "I wonder how much farther we'll have to go to find a real stream."

Hirundo took a more optimistic view of things than he did. "Oh, it won't be so bad, Your Majesty."

"No? Why not? I could piss across this miserable thing." Grus exaggerated, but not to any enormous degree.

Hirundo didn't lose his smile. "Yes, you could — now. But the Menteshe aren't going to try to hit us now. We've rocked them back on their heels. They'll need some time to regroup. If Korkut and Sanjar do decide to join forces against us, they'll need to do some dickering so one of them doesn't murder the other one anyhow. And pretty soon the fall rains will start. This is an ugly little excuse for a river now, but I think it'll fill out nicely once the rains get going."

He might have been talking about a girl on the edge of womanhood. Grus eyed the valley through which the stream ran. He had at least as much experience gauging such things as his general did. More than a little reluctantly, he nodded. "Well, you're probably right about that."

"Then let's stop here if we're going to stop," Hirundo said. "Otherwise, you may decide not to stop at all."

Grus didn't want to stop. He wanted to push on to Yozgat. Knowing it was impractical didn't make him want it any less.

Are your eyes bigger than your stomach? They'd better not be, he told himself sternly. "All right," he said. "We'll garrison this line, and we'll head home."

"Thank you, Your Majesty," Hirundo said. "This is the right thing to do. The Banished One would thank you for going on."

Would he? That was the question — or one of the questions, anyhow. The Banished One had tormented Avornis through the Menteshe for centuries. The nomads remained men, though, with wills of their own; they weren't thralls. And now they were a weapon that had broken in the Banished One's hands. Since Prince Ulash's death, his sons had cared more for fighting each other to lay hold of his throne than for raiding north of the Stura. And Korkut and Sanjar had kept right on going after each other despite the Avornan thrust south of the river.

If they kept on like that, they would have no principality left to rule even after one of them finally won their civil war. Neither prince seemed to care. Beating a brother was more important to both of them than turning back an invader. Grus would have scorned them more if he hadn't known a good many Avornans who thought the same way.

In the Argolid Mountains south of Yozgat, where he'd dwelled since being cast down from the heavens, the Banished One had to be beside himself with fury. What dreams was he sending to Ulash's unloving children? Having been on the receiving end of more of those dreams than he cared to remember, Grus almost pitied Korkut and Sanjar. No one, not even a Menteshe prince, deserved that kind of attention.

The king looked south again. Haze and clouds hid the mountains for now. If the exiled god couldn't use the Menteshe as he'd been accustomed to doing in days gone by, how could he strike at Avornis?

Weather was one obvious weapon. The Banished One had afflicted Avornis with at least one dreadful winter in the recent past. He'd tried to make the capital starve — tried and failed. Probably because he'd failed, he'd hesitated to use that ploy since. But it still remained not only possible but dangerous, deadly dangerous. No ordinary wizard could do much with the weather, either for good or for ill; it was beyond a mere man's strength. Such restrictions meant little to the Banished One, who was neither ordinary wizard nor mere mortal.

Lanius had done a good job of laying in extra stocks of grain before that harsh winter came down. Grus thought it would be wise to do the same thing again. Suppose the Banished One didn't choose to repeat himself. What else might he do?

Feeling his own imagination failing, Grus looked around for Pterocles. When he didn't see the sorcerer close by, he sent horsemen out to hunt him down. Before long, Pterocles rode up on his mule. "What can I do for you, Your Majesty?" he asked.

"Come aside with me a little ways." The king rode off until no one could hear what he and the wizard had to say to each other. Pterocles followed. The royal guards stationed themselves to ensure that no one approached the two of them. Grus said, "If you were the Banished One, what would you do to Avornis now?"

"Why ask me?" Pterocles said, his indignation at least partly genuine.