Letters took a couple of weeks to get down to the south. Answers took another couple of weeks to return, plus however long Grus waited before responding. Lanius thought that was much too slow for word games. If Grus happened not to agree with him, though, what could he do about it? Nothing he could see.
No, that wasn’t quite right. He could complain. He could, and he did, saying to Sosia, “Why doesn’t your father make more sense?”
“Father usually does make sense,” she answered. “Why don’t you think he does this time?”
Lanius recounted the exchange he’d had with Grus. “If he’s making any sense there, I think he’s doing his best to hide it,” he declared.
His wife frowned. “It seems straightforward enough to me. The Banished One is trying to keep the witch and him too busy with this war to go on with whatever they were doing at Cumanus.”
“The witch!” Lanius exclaimed. “That’s it! That must be it!”
“Now you’re the one who’s not making sense,” Sosia said.
“Don’t you see? It’s obvious!” Lanius said. “Alca must be doing something the Banished One doesn’t like. That’s why the Banished One made the Menteshe start this war. It has to be why.”
“Nothing has to be anything,” Sosia said tartly; maybe she hadn’t liked that It’s obvious! She went on, “If the Banished One was that eager to start trouble, why didn’t he have Ulash attack, and not this Prince Evren?”
“Why? Well, because…” Lanius’ voice trailed away as he realized he had no good answer for that. “I don’t know why. I wonder if getting a straight answer to the question would be worth another letter to your father.”
In the end, after some hesitation, he did send the letter. If Grus wanted to ignore it, he could. Grus had had a lot of practice ignoring things Lanius said and wrote. But he didn’t ignore this. In due course, he wrote, That is an interesting question if you want to go into detail, isn’t it? If you’ve got any interesting answers, please send them along. One thing I will say is that Evren is a handful all by himself, even without Ulash. I wonder more and more why the foxy old bugger is sitting this one out. He’d written bastard first, but scratched it out almost but not quite to illegibility and replaced it with the other word. Unlike Petrosus, he watched Lanius’ feelings, if not quite well enough.
Lanius drummed his ringers on his thigh. He didn’t have an answer, whether interesting or otherwise. Only one thing occurred to him—that Ulash had ruled his principality for a very long time, much longer even than Evren had held his. Lanius didn’t write that. Grus would know it as well as he did.
When he went in to see how the moncats were doing, Spider laid a present at his feet: the not very neatly disemboweled carcass of a mouse. The moncat stared up at him out of amber eyes.
The worst of it was, Spider expected to be praised and made much of for his hunting prowess. Lanius did the job, petting him till he purred and, while purring, tried to nip the King of Avornis’ hand.
“Don’t you bite me!” Lanius said, and thwapped him on the nose. This time, the stare Spider gave back sent only one message. If I were big enough, it said, I’d eat you. That stare went a long way toward explaining why people weren’t in the habit of making pets of lions and tigers and leopards.
Spider also took a long, thoughtful look at Lanius’ leg, as though wondering if he could avenge himself for that thwap. An ordinary cat wouldn’t have done that. An ordinary cat would either have run away or tried to bite him again right then. Yaropolk the Chernagor had warned Lanius that moncats were smarter than their everyday cousins. Not for the first time, the king saw that Yaropolk was right.
And Spider very visibly decided he couldn’t get away with biting Lanius on the leg. Instead, he picked up the mouse that was to have been a present and carried it away, climbing quickly up toward the roof of the room where he and his relatives lived. There, glowering down at Lanius, he finished dismembering the little animal and ate it.
It’s a good thing your kind isn’t bigger, Lanius thought. Otherwise, you might be the ones who kept us for pets. That was an idea to make a man modest. Then he had another, worse, one. Or you might keep us so you could treat us the way you treat mice.
A moment later, the mouse’s tail fell from Spider’s perch up near the ceiling and landed on the floor. Two moncats sprang forward to pounce on it. They saw each other, and both of them snarled. During that standoff, a third, smaller, moncat sneaked up and made away with the tail. They both chased him, but he escaped with the prize.
“That’s what happens,” Lanius said. “You weren’t paying enough attention, so that other little fellow got a snack.”
The two who’d confronted each other both eyed the king. It wasn’t—it couldn’t have been—that they spoke Avornan. But they gave the impression of listening alertly to whatever he might say. He slowly nodded to himself. He’d seen that before.
He wondered if anyone else would believe him. Moncats were much smarter than most people thought they were. Lanius was convinced of that.
How much smarter? he wondered. He didn’t know much about monkeys, but what little he did know made him suspect the moncats had wits of similar level. Monkeys, from what little he knew, were social animals. That was much less true of moncats—they differed from monkeys as ordinary cats differed from people.
“Interesting,” Lanius murmured. Again, the moncats watched him. They paid close attention when he spoke. What did that mean? How could a mere human being know? With a sigh, Lanius admitted to himself that he couldn’t.
He wished he knew more about monkeys. Only old records in the archives spoke of them. Since the days when the Menteshe swarmed out of the south, Avornis hadn’t ruled lands where the monkeys lived. One more reason to wish we could start retaking the lands south of the Stura, Lanius thought.
He didn’t have the chance to go prowling through old parchments after monkeys, not then. A well-founded suspicion that Sosia would clout him if he didn’t pay some occasional attention to Crex and Pitta sent him back to his own chamber. He even enjoyed playing with his own children. They loved him without reservation, which was true of no one and nothing else in the world—not Sosia herself, and not the moncats, either. His wife had ties other than the ones that bound her to him; the animals cared for him—to the extent that they did care for him— because he tended them, not because of who he was.
But, being who he was, he didn’t forget what he wanted to find out. After a while, Sosia said, “You’ve got something on your mind—I can tell.”
“Monkeys,” Lanius answered.
“Monkeys?” Sosia echoed. Whatever she’d expected, that wasn’t it. “What about them?”
“Anything you can tell me,” Lanius said. “Anything anybody can tell me.”
“You’ve got that look in your eye again,” Sosia said, which was undoubtedly true. She went on, “All I know about monkeys is that they live in trees and look like ugly little people with tails and too much hair.”
“Except for the tails, you’re talking about half the courtiers in the city of Avornis,” Lanius said. “More than half.”
That startled laughter from his wife, who said, “Well, what do you know about monkeys? What do you want to find out?”
“I don’t know much,” Lanius said. “I want to find out what I don’t know—what I don’t know and what’s true.”
“Why do you want to know about monkeys?” Sosia asked. “You never did say.”