“I want to find out how they’re like moncats and how they’re not,” Lanius answered.
“Oh, you do?” Sosia sounded tolerantly amused. She’d seen such moods come on her husband before. Even so, she asked, “Why do you want to know that?”
She must have known what Lanius would say before he said it. And, sure enough, he did say it. “I’m just curious.”
Queen Sosia laughed again, out loud this time. “Well, Your Majesty,” she said, “if you’re not entitled to indulge your curiosity, who is?”
“But that’s just it,” Lanius said. “If the answers aren’t in the records, how can I find them? It doesn’t matter who I am— without the records, I’m never going to know.” He paused. That wasn’t necessarily true. “I’m never going to know, I mean, unless I can talk someone into bringing monkeys to the city of Avornis. The Chernagors, maybe, or some Avornan traders.”
“Wait a minute. Wait just a minute.” His wife no longer sounded amused—or tolerant, either. “Don’t you think the palace is enough of a menagerie now, with the moncats? How much mischief would monkeys get into? How much of a mess do monkeys make? How bad does monkey shit stink?”
“I don’t know any of those things!” Excitement rose in Lanius’ voice. “Wouldn’t it be fun to find out?”
“That’s not the word I’d use,” Sosia answered. “And I’m sure that’s not the word my father would use.”
She was bound to be right. That didn’t make Lanius any less eager—on the contrary. He knew he had to be sly, though. He said, “Well, nobody’s brought monkeys here for years and years.”
Sosia relaxed. Lanius started laying his plans.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
King Grus was laying his plans as well. He wondered how much good it would do. Turning to Hirundo, who’d come down from the north not long before, he said, “Fighting the Menteshe is like hitting a glob of quicksilver with a hammer. You don’t make the glob disappear. You just smash it up into a bunch of little globs.”
“Well, then we smash the little globs one at a time,” Hirundo answered, cheerful as usual. “You can get rid of them for good. It takes work, that’s all. You can’t do that with a real glob of quicksilver.”
“No, you can’t,” Grus admitted. “But with real quicksilver, the little globs don’t go running around trying to turn back into one big one again, either.”
“If you’re going to worry about everything…” Hirundo said. Grus laughed, though it wasn’t funny. One thing he’d found since becoming king was that he had to worry about everything. If he didn’t, who would?
The campfire crackled as a stick fell down when the smaller stick supporting it burned through. Off in the distance, an owl hooted mournfully. The Avornan army had extra sentries surrounding the encampment on all sides, and squadrons of horsemen ready to charge into battle at a moment’s notice. Grus felt only moderately safe even so.
He said, “The Menteshe are like foxes. They sneak through the night.”
“Foxes made of quicksilver,” Hirundo said helpfully.
“I didn’t order you down here for literary criticism,” Grus said. “I wanted you to help me figure out how to beat Prince Evren’s men.”
“Same way we always beat the nomads—when we do,” Hirundo said. “We need a bouncy young chap to drive them down to the river, and a clever captain of river galleys to make sure they don’t cross to the south bank.”
“Where would we find officers like that?” Grus asked. They both laughed. The days when Hirundo had driven the Menteshe down to the Stura and Grus had kept them from crossing seemed very far away.
As though to prove how distant they were, Grus had to climb onto the back of a horse the next day. He would have given a good deal to have the pitching, rolling deck of a river galley under him instead. He knew how to handle anything that might go wrong there. Even after all these years, his relationship with horses remained wary.
And the relationship between Avornis and the Menteshe remained one of passionate mutual loathing. Hirundo’s men managed to surround a band of the nomads, catching them by surprise around their campfires. By the time the Menteshe realized they were in danger, the Avornans had cut off any hope of escape.
For form’s sake, King Grus sent in an officer under flag of truce offering to spare the lives of Prince Evren’s men if they surrendered. For form’s sake, they sent him back alive. Then the killing started.
Grus himself had never made more than an indifferent rider, as he knew to his chagrin. Many Avornans, though, excelled on horseback. To them, horses were friends and comrades, not merely conveniences for getting from here to there faster than a man could walk. Next to the Menteshe, though, they might all have had Grus’ attitude and skill. People said the nomads were born in the saddle. After what Grus saw in that fight, he wouldn’t have argued for a moment.
The horses they rode were nothing much to look at: plains ponies that hardly reached the shoulders of the Avornans’ mounts. But those ponies were fast and strong and seemed never to tire. And what the nomads did from their backs… Grus was among the most sincere enemies the Menteshe had, but he knew better than to call them cowards.
When the Avornans came toward them from all sides, they must have known they probably wouldn’t escape. Instead of waiting to be slaughtered, though, they galloped forward— straight toward Grus, whether by design or by chance. Although outnumbered eight or ten to one, by the way they came they might have been the ones with numbers on their side. Then they started shooting, and for a dreadful little while Grus wondered whether they were right to be so confident.
He’d heard things about the archery of the Menteshe. He’d seen some of it in earlier fights here. But this… The nomads’ bows, backed with horn and sinew, outranged those of the Avornans. And the Menteshe shot faster than merely mortal men had any business doing. People told tales of clouds of arrows darkening the sun as they flew. As the volley from Evren’s men hissed through the air toward the Avornans, Grus understood for the first time how such tales were born. He threw his shield up to protect his face.
Had one of those arrows bitten him, the shield probably would have done no good. The nomads’ bows gave their shafts not only great range but also great striking power. They pierced shields. They pierced chain mail. And they pierced flesh—the flesh of both men and horses. Men shrieked. Horses screamed and crashed to the ground, throwing or crushing their riders. Other horses tripped over them and went down, too.
An arrow buzzed past Grus’ head, so close that the fletching stroked his beard. He didn’t even have time to be horrified, for the Menteshe galloped toward him, intent on cutting their way out through the gap they’d shot in the Avornan line. As they neared, they drew their sabers. The blades glittered in the morning sun.
“We have to hold them!” Grus yelled. “We can’t let them break through!” Belatedly, he remembered to draw his own sword. He hoped enough men around and behind him remained to hold the Menteshe till the rest of his cavalrymen could close with them and finish them off.
He also hoped, again belatedly, that he would live through the encounter. On the deck of a river galley, he would have had the edge over any nomad ever born. On horseback, though, the tables were turned. Here came one of Evren’s men, shouting something in his own language. He cut at Grus. Grus beat the blade aside and slashed at the Menteshe’s mount. His sword scored a bleeding line across its croup, not far in front of its tail.
With the terrible cry of a horse in pain, the beast reared. The Menteshe clung to the saddle as burrs clung to the long hair of its tail. Grus cut at him from behind. The nomad wore a shirt of leather boiled in tallow—not as strong as chain mail, but much lighter. It proved strong enough to keep Grus’ blade from laying the fellow’s back open, though by his grunt of pain the blow still hurt. Grus understood that. He wore padding under his mail to keep swordstrokes from breaking ribs.