Dan Chernenko - The Scepter_s Return

He didn't have time to wonder whether that was his vanity talking. The Menteshe seemed to have forgotten the Avornans had trounced them twice in recent weeks. By the way they pressed forward, they might have been the ones who'd done all the winning lately.

And the Avornans, who seemed taken aback by the nomads' aggressiveness, began to drift toward the rear. After shouting and cursing at them, Hirundo turned to Grus and said, "Your Majesty, looks like it's time to retreat."

"It does, doesn't it?" Grus said. "Falling back from the Menteshe .. They're going to push us hard. They'll want to see if they can break us."

"They'd better not," Hirundo said. "That would be downright embarrassing." It would be worse than embarrassing, but Hirundo always looked on the bright side of things.

Grus guided his gelding back to the north. More and more Avornans were riding in that direction. The Menteshe shouted louder and more ferociously than ever. They pressed the Avornans harder – and Grus' men retreated faster. That encouraged the nomads to press them harder still.

Retreat turned into something that looked a lot like rout. Only a stubborn rear guard kept the Menteshe from smashing the Avornan army to pieces. Even the men in the rear guard kept on retreating for all they were worth. The Menteshe, having lost their earlier fights with the Avornans, pushed hard now, intent on doing the hated foes in front of them as much harm as they could. Any soldiers worthy of their weapons would have done the same.

It mined them.

Because they had an enemy in front of them, they paid no attention to what lay off to the side – until the stone-throwers and dart-throwers sitting in the shadows cast by a grove of olive trees all opened up at once, throwing them into confusion.

Before the Menteshe had a chance to recover, most of the heavily armored royal guardsmen – who'd waited patiently in the olive grove – set spurs to their horses and thundered forward.

Horn calls rang out through what had been the retreating Avornan army, and the Avornans retreated no more, but went over to the attack. When they did, Grus and Hirundo, who were riding side by side, reached out at the same time and clasped hands with each other. A deliberate retreat was one of the hardest things in war to bring off. When an army pretended to fall back, it all too often started falling back in earnest. But the Avornans turned around and struck as fiercely as Grus could have hoped.

The Menteshe broke. Caught with a blow at their flank and suddenly and unexpectedly assailed from the front as well, they fled in all directions. Escape was the only thing that seemed to matter to them. If they could get away..

A lot of them couldn't. A lot of them went down to the guardsmen's lances or were hacked out of the saddle by their swords. At close quarters, Avornan archers could hold their own with the Menteshe, too, and they filled the air with shafts, shooting as fast as they could.

Nomads threw down their weapons and did their best to surrender. As on any battlefield, giving up was a risky business. With their fighting blood up, not all Avornans felt like taking prisoners. And a few Menteshe pretended to surrender and then started fighting again, which did neither them nor their comrades any good.

"Bori-Bars!" The shout went up not too far from Grus. "We have Bori-Bars!"

Grinning, the king clasped hands with Hirundo again. That was one of the things he'd most hoped for. Capturing the able general weakened the nomads. And now the Avornans would be able to question him. Who was his commander? Korkut? Sanjar? The Banished One?

Pterocles pointed at Grus. "I know what you were doing."

"Do you?" Grus said. "I often wonder myself."

"You can't get away with being coy, not this time," the wizard said. "You wanted me to fight the Menteshe so they'd do everything they could to break through my spells – and so they wouldn't do anything else." "Who, me?" Grus said.

"Yes, you." Pterocles did his best to look severe. "And they were pounding on me, and I was doing everything I could to fend them off, and that only made them pound harder. But we weren't really masking anything after all."

"They never found that out, did they?" Grus asked. Pterocles shook his head. The king grinned again. "That was what I had in mind."

"You know how to get what you want, don't you?"

"I'm not sure yet," Grus answered, the grin slipping as fast as it appeared. "We'll know better as this campaign wears along, won't we?"

Before Pterocles could say anything, a soldier called, "Your Majesty, here's Bori-Bars!" The Menteshe general was still mounted on his rough-coated little horse. His hands were tied in front of him, his feet tied together under the horse's belly. He had a cut over one eye that splashed his swarthy face with blood and an expression that said he wished he were dead.

"Do you speak Avornan?" Grus asked. Reluctantly, Bori-Bars nodded. The king said, "You make a dangerous foe."

"So do you, Your Majesty." The Menteshe scowled. "I hoped you would be the one with ropes." He raised his hands a little.

"Life doesn't always give us what we hope," Grus said, and Bori-Bars nodded again. Leaning forward in the saddle, Grus asked, "Who is your master?"

"At the moment, you are," Bori-Bars answered sourly.

Grus bowed in the saddle. "Well, so I am. But who gave you the orders to attack my army?"

"No one did," Bori-Bars said. "My scouts spotted your men. It looked to be a good place to hit you. It was a good place to hit you. But you turned out to be sneakier than I expected. You fought that battle the way one of my folk might. Who would have looked for such a thing from an Avornan?"

"For which I thank you." Grus bowed in the saddle again. "But for whom did you command that army? Who is your superior?"

"I reckon no man my superior." Pride rang in Bori-Bars' voice.

"You are being difficult." Grus exhaled in exasperation. "I will point out to you – once – that you are in a poor position to be difficult. Now then – does that army you commanded owe allegiance to Korkut, or to Sanjar, or to the Banished One?"

"We all owe allegiance to the Fallen Star. Him I will reckon my superior." Bori-Bars still sounded proud. Grus did not understand that and did not particularly want to understand it – it struck him as being proud one was a slave – but he had also seen it from other Menteshe.

It was one more thing he would have to think about another time. "Do you also follow Korkut, or do you also follow Sanjar?"

"I follow the Fallen Star," Bori-Bars said.

"And no one else?" Grus asked. The captured general repeated himself. "If that's yes, then I know of Menteshe who don't like it," Grus told him. "I know of Menteshe who are working against the sorcery that makes it so. I know of Menteshe who want to follow their own will first, and who don't care to be sent halfway to thralldom."

That got through to Bori-Bars. His eyes flashed. "You know of my folk who would turn against the Fallen Star? I say you lie."

"I say you don't know what you're talking about," Grus replied. "I could name names. They would be names you know. But what would be the point? The names will do you no good, not after I send you back to Avornis. You have many, many more questions to answer." He nodded to the men who'd captured Bori-Bars. "Take him away. Put him in the compound with the rest of the captured Menteshe officers, but don't let him speak to them or they to him."

"Yes, Your Majesty," they chorused.

Away went the Menteshe general. Grus summoned the Avornan officer in charge of that compound. He was a stolid, middle-aged fellow named Lagopus. He blinked several times when Grus told him, "I want you to let Bori-Bars escape tonight."

"Your Majesty?" Lagopus dug a finger in his ear, as though wondering if he could have heard right.