Dan Chernenko: The Bastard King

The king had already seen that for himself. It made him as absurdly proud as he’d been jealous a moment before. “Good,” he said. “Give him to me, will you?”

Awkwardly, Certhia pulled the baby free. His face screwed up. He began to cry. His high, thin wail echoed from the walls of the birthing chamber. Certhia held him out to Mergus.

“A son,” the king murmured. “At last, after all these years, a son.” He held his newborn heir much more easily than Certhia had. He’d never had a son before, no, but he’d had plenty of practice with daughters. Putting the baby up on his shoulder, he patted it on the back.

“That’s too hard. You’ll hurt him,” Certhia said.

“I know what I’m doing,” Mergus told her. And he proved it—a moment later, the baby rewarded him with a surprisingly loud belch. The baby stopped crying then, as though he’d surprised himself.

“We’ll call him—”

“Lanius,” King Mergus broke in. He wanted to say the name before anyone else could, even his concubine. “Prince Lanius. King Lanius, when his time comes.” The prince—the king to come—had, at the moment, an oddly shaped head much too big for his body, and an unfocused stare. Mergus’ daughters had outgrown such things. He knew Lanius would, too.

Livia the midwife stuck her head into the chamber. “There’s a priest here,” she said.

“Good,” Mergus said. “Tell him to come in.” As the man in the green robe did, Certhia squeaked and tried to set her robe to rights. Ignoring that, King Mergus nodded to the priest. “Get with it, Hallow Perdix. I need a proper queen.”

Captain Grus was drinking wine in a riverside tavern in the town of Cumanus when the news got to him. The fellow who brought it to the tavern stood in the doorway and bawled it out at the top of his lungs. The place—it was called the Nixie—had been noisy and friendly, with rivermen and merchants chattering; with a dice game in one corner; with about every other man trying to get one of the barmaids to go upstairs with him. But silence slammed down like a blow from a morningstar.

Nicator broke it. “He married her? He took a seventh wife? Go peddle it somewhere else, pal. Nobody’d do anything like that. It’s against nature, is what it is.”

All over the Nixie, heads solemnly bobbed up and down, Grus’ among them. The very idea of a seventh wife was absurd. (His own wife, Estrilda, would have found the very idea of a second wife for him absurd—but that was a different story, and a different sort of story, too, since it had nothing to do with the gods—but if Olor had only six wives…)

The news bringer held out both hands before him, palms up, as though taking an oath. “May the Banished One make me into a thrall if I lie,” he said, and the silence he got this time was of a different sort. Nobody, especially here on the border, would say such a thing lightly. Into that silence, he went on, “He did marry her, I tell you. Said he wanted to make sure his heir—Lanius, the brat’s name is—wasn’t a bastard. Hallow Perdix said the words over him and his concubine—I mean, over Queen Certhia.”

“How’d he find a priest who’d say such filthy words?” somebody asked belligerently.

“How? I’ll tell you how,” answered the man in the doorway. “The priest who married them was Hallow Perdix. Now he’s High Hallow Perdix. He was no fool, not him. He knew which side his bread was buttered on.”

“That’s terrible!” two or three people said at once. Whether it was terrible or not, Grus was convinced it was true. The man with the news had too many details at his fingertips for it to be something he was making up.

“What does the arch-hallow have to say about the whole business?” he asked.

“Good question!” the news bringer said. “Nobody knows the answer yet, I don’t think. If he says Prince Lanius is a bastard, he’s a bastard, all right, and he isn’t a prince, not anymore.”

“If he says that, I know what King Mergus says: ‘Out!’ ” Nicator jerked a thumb at the door, as though dismissing a rowdy drunk.

“ Can the king sack the arch-hallow?” Grus asked.

“ I don’t know,” Nicator said. “Can the arch-hallow tell the king the son he’s waited for his whole life long is nothing but a little bastard who’ll never, ever, plop his backside down on the Diamond Throne?”

That was another good question. Grus had no idea what soft of answer it had. He was sure of one thing, though—Avornis would find out. No, he was suddenly sure of two things. He wished he weren’t, and gulped his wine cup dry to try to chase the second thing from his head.

No such luck. Nicator knew that had to mean something, and asked, “What is it, Skipper?”

“I’ll tell you what,” Grus answered. “I can almost hear the Banished One laughing from here, that’s what.” He held up his cup to show the nearest barmaid it was empty, then proceeded to get very drunk.

King Mergus strode through the royal palace in the city of Avornis in the center of a bubble of silence. Whenever servants or courtiers or soldiers saw him coming, they jerked apart from one another, bowed with all the respect they were supposed to show, and stayed frozen as statues till he’d passed. Then they started up again, talking behind his back.

He’d tried catching them at it a couple of times. He could, but the sport soon palled. They didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed.

The real trouble began a few days after Hallow Perdix made the king’s concubine queen. Mergus came up a corridor at the same instant that his brother, Prince Scolopax, started down it from the other end.

They both stopped for half a heartbeat when they saw each other, and then both kept walking. Mergus braced himself, as though heading into battle—and so he was.

For close to thirty years, Mergus had ruled Avornis. For close to thirty years, his younger brother had been a spare wheel—and a mistrusted spare wheel, at that. With nothing useful to do, Scolopax had thrown himself into drink and dissipation. These days, he looked ten years older than the king.

With a grim nod, Mergus started to walk past Scolopax. “You bastard,” his brother said, breathing wine fumes into his face. “You and your bastard.”

A couple of servants had been walking along the passageway, too. They froze and turned back toward the king and his brother, staring as they might have stared after the first warning rumble of an avalanche. King Mergus hardly noticed them. If his look could have killed, Scolopax would have lain dead on the floor. “Call me what you choose—” Mergus began.

Prince Scolopax glared back with loathing all the greater for being, unlike Mergus, impotent. “If I did, your bones would catch fire inside your stinking carcass.”

Mergus went on as though his brother hadn’t spoken: “—but Lanius is my legitimate son and heir, being the child of my lawfully wedded wife.”

Scolopax’s scornful snort sounded as though he were breaking wind. “Throw seven and you’ll win at dice. At marriage?”

He made that rude, rude noise again. “How much did you pay Perdix the pimp, besides promotion?”

“He won promotion on his merits, and I paid him not a copper halfpenny.” Mergus lied without hesitation.

Scolopax’s laugh was more a howl of pain. He shook a long, bony finger under the king’s nose. “All right. All right, gods curse you. Olor has six, but you think you’re entitled to more. But I tell you this, my dear brother.” A viper could have given the word no more venom. Shaking his finger again, Scolopax went on, “I tell you this: Whether you have that bastard or not, I know who’s going to rule Avornis when you’re stinking in your grave. Me, that’s who!” He jabbed his thumb at his own chest.