Hirundo kept his mind more firmly fixed on the task ahead. “Seeing as we will have to face old Dagipert before too long, what do you suppose he’ll be up to this campaigning season?”
“No good,” Grus replied, which made the general laugh. Grus chuckled, too, but he hadn’t been joking. He went on, “He’ll do whatever he can to hurt Avornis. He’s been doing it for years. Why should he change?”
“He’s been doing it altogether too well, too,” Hirundo said.
“I’m not the one to tell you you’re wrong,” Grus said, “but I’m sure Dagipert would say he hasn’t done it well enough. If he had his way, after all, he’d be calling the shots in Avornis these days, and Lanius’ children would be his grandchildren, not mine.”
Not even the burgeoning growth of spring could mask all the depredations the Thervings had wrought over the past few years. Isolated farmhouses and barns still stood in gaunt, charred ruins. A hawk perched on a chimney that remained upright while the house of which it had been a part was only a memory. It stared at Grus and the oncoming soldiers out of great yellow eyes, then flew away. Weeds smothered what would have been—should have been—fields of wheat or barley or rye.
And country farmhouses weren’t all that suffered. Whole villages and even fortified towns had vanished off the face of the earth. “We’ll be years rebuilding this,” Grus said, a gloomy thought that had occurred to him before.
Even before the army reached the Tuola River, Grus sent scouts out ahead of it and to either side. Unlike Count Corvus, he didn’t intend to be taken by surprise.
But whether King Grus intended for it to happen or not, Dagipert did surprise him. The bridges over the Tuola remained down. Only ferryboats connected the western province with the rest of Avornis. That didn’t keep Avornans from the west from fleeing over the river with news—the Thervings had marched into the western province as Grus was marching out of the city of Avornis.
One of the refugees said, “That’s not our chief news, Your Majesty—that the Thervings are over the border, I mean.” Another man standing behind him nodded. “I’m carrying a message from King Dagipert.”
“Well, you’d better tell me what is, then,” Grus answered. “Don’t waste time, either.”
The man from the far bank of the Tuola said, “Maybe you won’t have to fight. Dagipert wants to talk to you face-to-face.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” Grus said. “Someplace near a forest, I’d bet, where he can spring an ambush the first chance he sees.”
“No, sir.” The man shook his head. “He wants both sides to bridge out from the banks of the Tuola till their spans almost meet in the middle. He says they should stop just too far apart to let a murderer jump from one to the other. He swears by Olor and Quelea he’ll go back to Thervingia in peace once you’ve met.”
Grus felt men’s eyes on him. He knew it might be a trap. Dagipert might want nothing more than time to solidify his position in the province west of the Tuola. Time would do him only so much good, though. The Avornans still controlled the river itself. They could use their ships to put an army across almost where they chose—near its headwaters, the Tuola did get too shallow for such games.
After half a minute’s thought, Grus decided the chance to win a summer without war—it would be the first of his reign— was too good to pass up. “Will you go back to Dagipert?” he asked the man who’d spoken to him. When the fellow nodded, Grus said, “All right, then. Tell him I agree. We’ll build where his ambassadors usually cross the river—he’ll know the place.”
He led his own army to the remains of the bridge that had stood in happier times. He didn’t lead all of it there, though. He sent detachments to cover a couple of other likely crossings, in case Dagipert had some elaborate treachery in mind. But the King of Thervingia certainly seemed to have brought most if not all of his army to the other side of the crossing. Their tents, some of wool, others of leather, formed a sprawling, disorderly town there.
“I wonder how long they can stay in one spot before hunger and disease get loose among ’em,” Hirundo said in speculative tones.
“Yes.” But Grus’ agreement was halfhearted. He knew he could feed his own men for a long time. Disease, though… Disease could break out any moment, as the gods willed. Fluxes of the bowels and smallpox sometimes did more to break up a campaign than anything the warriors on the other side might manage.
Avornan engineers built an elegant wooden span halfway across the Tuola. The Thervings’ bridge was nowhere near as handsome. Grus doubted it would have held as much weight as the Avornan effort. But, for Dagipert and a few guardsmen, it served perfectly well. And it advanced at least as fast as the bridge the Avornans built.
In a couple of days, Avornans and Thervings who spoke Avornan were shouting back and forth across the narrowing stretch of river that separated them. They agreed Grus and Dagipert would meet at dawn the next morning.
Grus wore royal robes as he stepped out onto the bridge. Under them, he wore a mail shirt. His crown was a helmet with a gold circlet of rank. Several guardsmen with large shields accompanied him, to make sure the Thervings didn’t shoot arrows at him while he was within easy range.
On the other side of the Tuola, King Dagipert’s preparations looked similar. His royal robes were even gaudier than the Avornan ones they imitated. He wore a real crown over what looked like a brimless, close-fitting iron cap. His guards were enormous and burly men. They carried shields slightly smaller than those the Avornans used, but only slightly.
Dagipert himself had a bushy white beard and a long white braid that hung halfway down his back. His shoulders were stooped, perhaps from years, perhaps from the weight of a mail shirt of his own. As he got closer, Grus saw he had an engagingly ugly face. If he was going to die soon, he didn’t know it. Remembering his father, Grus knew that didn’t mean anything, but he wished Dagipert would have looked feebler.
Dagipert was studying him, too. In fluent Avornan, the King of Thervingia said, “I should have killed you when we met on the field a couple of years ago.”
“And a good day to you, too, Your Majesty,” Grus replied. That made Dagipert laugh. Grus went on, “I wouldn’t have been sorry to stretch you out in the dirt, either, you know.”
“Not the way you handle a horse,” Dagipert said. “My grandmother had a better seat when she was eighty-five.”
That stung. Grus didn’t even think Dagipert was lying, which made it sting all the more. “Did you ask for this meeting so you could insult me?”
“Among other things,” Dagipert answered. “You yoked your daughter to Lanius when he should have married mine. Arch-Hallow Bucco made the betrothal agreement.”
“He didn’t have the authority to do it. And he’s dead. You may as well quit complaining about that, Dagipert, especially since Lanius’ son”— and my grandson, Grus thought, though he didn’t say that out loud—“will be one before long.”
“Yes, Lanius has a son. You have a grandson,” Dagipert said heavily. The King of Thervingia scowled from under bushy eyebrows, reminding Grus of a very old, very sly, very dangerous bear. “And, by the gods, I’ve made you pay for your thievery.”
“Are you telling me you wouldn’t have ravished Avornis if I weren’t king, if Lanius hadn’t wed Sosia?” Grus asked. “I don’t believe it for a minute.”