Dan Chernenko - The Chernagor Pirates

He brought them down into a frown now. “What are you doing on my land?” he demanded. “You have no business here, curse it.”

“What were your ships doing raiding my coast a few years ago?” Grus asked in turn.

“That’s different,” Gleb said.

“Yes, it is, by the gods, and I know how,” Grus said. “The difference is, you never thought I’d come here to pay you back.”

Gleb scowled. He didn’t try to deny it, from which Grus concluded that he couldn’t. All he said was, “Well, now that you are here, what do I have to do to get rid of you?”

“Wait.” Grus held up a hand. “Don’t go so fast. We’re not done with this bit yet. What were your men doing helping Vasilko against Prince Vsevolod? What were they doing helping the Banished One against the gods in the heavens? Do you still bend the knee to the Banished One, Your Highness?”

“I never did.” Gleb sounded indignant.

“No? Then what were you doing helping Vasilko? I already asked you once, and you didn’t answer.”

“What was I doing? You Avornans invaded the land of the Chernagors. What was I supposed to do, let you have your way here? If I could hurt you, I would.”

Now Grus was the one who scowled. He’d had Chernagors tell him that before. He could understand it, even believe it. But it also made such a handy excuse. “And you’re telling me you had no idea Vasilko had abandoned the gods in the heavens, and that the Banished One backed him? Do you expect me to believe you?”

“I don’t care what you believe,” Gleb said.

“No?” Grus said. “Are you sure of that? Are you very sure? Because if you are, I am going to ravage your countryside. Being a friend to other Chernagors is one thing. Being a friend to the Banished One is something else again.”

Prince Gleb opened his mouth. Then he closed it again without saying anything. After an obvious pause for thought, he tried again. “I told you once, I do not worship the Banished One. I give reverence to King Olor and Queen Quelea and the rest of the gods in the heavens. I always have. So have my people.”

Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe. Grus said, “Whether that’s so or not, you are still going to pay for raiding our coasts. You don’t care for Avornis in the Chernagor country. We don’t like Chernagors plundering Avornis.”

Again, Gleb started to speak. Grus could make a good guess about what he was going to say—something like, Well, what makes you any better than we are? But the answer to that was so obvious, Gleb again fell silent. An Avornan army camped outside of Jobuka gave Grus a potent argument. The Chernagor prince’s sour stare said he knew as much. Sullenly, he asked, “How much are you going to squeeze out of me?”

Grus told him the same thing as he’d told Prince Lazutin. He wondered how Gleb would go about haggling. The only thing he was sure of was that Gleb would.

Sure enough, the Prince of Jobuka exclaimed, “Letting you loose on the countryside would be cheaper!”

“Well, that can be arranged, Your Highness,” Grus said with a bow. He called for Hirundo. When the general arrived, the king said, “If you’d be kind enough to give the orders turning our soldiers loose…”

“Certainly, Your Majesty.” Hirundo turned to leave once more. Where Prince Gleb could see him, he was all brisk business.

He’d taken only a couple of steps before Gleb said, “Wait!” Hirundo paused, looking back toward the king.

“Why should he wait?” Grus asked. “You told us what your choice was, Your Highness. We’re willing to give you what you say you want. Carry on, Hirundo.”

“Wait!” Gleb said again, more urgently—almost frantically—this time. Again, Hirundo paused. Grus waved him on. Prince Gleb threw his hands in the air. “Stop, curse you! I was wrong. I’d rather pay.”

“The full sum?” Grus demanded. Now that he had Gleb over a barrel—one the Prince of Jobuka had brought out himself and then fallen over—he intended to take full advantage of it.

“Yes, the full sum,” Gleb said. “Just leave the crops alone!”

What did that say? That his storehouses were almost empty? Grus wouldn’t have been surprised. “Bring out the silver by this hour tomorrow,” the king told Gleb. “Otherwise…”

“I understood you,” Gleb said sourly. “You don’t need to worry about that, Your Majesty. I understood you very well.”

Having made the promise to pay, he kept it. Grus checked the silver even more closely than he had the money he’d gotten from Prince Lazutin. All of it proved good. He doubted any of the Chernagors would pay when he didn’t have an army at their doorstep, but he didn’t intend to lose a lot of sleep over it. He’d squeezed them plenty hard as things were. He left the encampment near the formidable walls of Jobuka and marched his army south.

“Are we heading for home, Your Majesty?” Hirundo asked in some surprise. “I thought we’d pay a call on Hrvace, too.”

“We will,” Grus said.

“But…” Hirundo pointed west. “It’s that way.”

“Thank you so very much,” Grus said, and the general winced. The king went on, “Before I turn west, I want to get Jobuka under the horizon. If Gleb sees me going that way, he’s liable to send a ship to Hrvace. It, could get there before we do, and that could let Prince Tvorimir set up an ambush.”

Hirundo bowed in the saddle. “Well, I can’t very well tell you you’re wrong, because you’re right. The only thing I will say is, Gleb’s liable to send that ship anyway. We ought to be ready for trouble.”

“So we should,” Grus said. “I trust you’ll make sure we are?”

“You’re a trusting soul, aren’t you?” the general replied.

King Grus laughed out loud at that. Maybe some Kings of Avornis had been trusting souls. Lanius was a dedicated antiquarian. He might know of one or two. Grus couldn’t think of any. If a trusting soul had somehow mounted the Avornan throne, he wouldn’t have lasted long.

Lanius knew he went to the archives like a lover to his beloved—the figure of speech Sosia had used held some truth. He would never have used it around her himself. It was too likely to stir up her suspicions.

Working on How to Be a King gave him a perfect excuse for poking through ancient documents. He laughed at himself. Oh, yes, I really need an excuse to get dusty.

He was looking for documents dealing with Thervingia during his fathers reign and the early years of his own—the days when King Dagipert had ruled the kingdom to the west, and when Dagipert had threatened to rule Avornis as well.

For the moment, Lanius wrote, Avornans do not often think of Thervingia. It is a quiet, peaceful land, not one to cause trouble or alarm here. But this has not always been so, nor is there any guarantee that it shall always be so. Time may reveal Thervingia once more as a frightful danger. This being so, my beloved son, you should know as much as possible about the bygone days when Thervingia threatened our very dynasty.

To Crex, those days would seem as distant as the time before the Menteshe seized the Scepter of Mercy. They were beyond his memory, and all times before one’s own memory ran together. But Lanius remembered them well, and hoped to give his son some hints about how to deal with Thervingia if it turned troublesome again.

Knowing how to deal with the Thervings meant knowing how Avornis had dealt with them in days gone by. So Lanius told himself, anyhow. It gave him a splendid excuse for going through the archives and reading old parchments.

How had his father and Grus dealt with Dagipert? Carefully, it seemed. Reading the letters Mergus and Grus and Arch-Hallow Bucco had exchanged with the King of Thervingia, it struck Lanius that Dagipert had had the upper hand more often than not. That wasn’t the way Lanius remembered things, but he’d been young and hadn’t been encouraged to worry about affairs of state. He’d assumed everything was all right, and in the end he hadn’t been wrong. But the road to the end had been rockier than he realized.