Before long, he tried another sketch. This one turned out better— not great, but better. He concentrated hard, working to make the drawing show some tiny fraction of a climbing moncat’s fluidity. He was never happier than when he concentrated hard. Maybe that was why he enjoyed both the painting and his sorties into the archives.
Both painting and archive-crawling would have made Anser yawn until the top of his head fell off. Put him in the woods stalking a deer, though, and he concentrated as hard as anyone—and he was happy then (unless he missed his shot, of course).
For a moment, Lanius thought he’d stumbled onto something important. But then he realized he’d just rephrased the question. Why did old parchments make him concentrate, while the arch-hallow needed to try not to crunch a dry leaf under his foot? Lanius still didn’t know.
He worked hard turning the sketch into a finished painting, too. He always put extra effort into getting the texture of the moncats’ fur right. He’d had some special brushes made, only a few bristles wide. They let him suggest the countless number of fine hairs of slightly different colors that went into the pelts. The real difficulty, though, didn’t lie in the brushes. The real difficulty lay in his own right hand, and he knew it. If he’d had more skill and more training, he could have come closer to portraying the moncats as they really were.
Every so often, one of the animals would come over and sit close by him while he painted. The moncats never paid any attention to the work on his easel; they did sometimes try to steal his brushes or his little pots of paint. Maybe the linseed oil that held the pigments smelled intriguing. Or maybe it was the odor of the bristles. Then again, maybe the moncats were just nuisances. When one of them made a getaway to the very top of the room with a brush, Lanius was inclined to believe it. After gnawing at the handle of the brush, the moncat got bored with it and let it drop. Lanius scooped it up before another animal could steal it.
He was carrying the finished painting down the hall when a maidservant coming the other way stopped to admire it. “So that’s what your pets look like, Your Majesty,” she said.
“Yes, that’s right, Cristata,” he answered.
“That’s very good work,” she went on, looking closer. “You can see every little thing about them. Are their back feet really like that, with the funny big toes that look like they can grab things?”
“They can grab things,” he said. “Moncats are born climbers—and born thieves.” After a moment, he added, “How are you these days?”
“Fair,” she answered. “It doesn’t bother me anymore, so that’s something.” She didn’t want to name Ortalis, for which Lanius couldn’t blame her. She went on, “The money you and King Grus gave me, that’s nice. I’ve never had money before, except to get by on from day to day. But…” Her pretty face clouded.
“What’s the matter?” Lanius asked. “Don’t tell me you’re running short already.”
“Oh, no. It isn’t that. I try hard to be careful,” she said. “It’s just that…” She turned red; Lanius watched—watched with considerable interest—as the flush rose from her neck to her hairline. “I shouldn’t tell you this.”
“Then don’t,” Lanius said at once.
“No. If I can’t tell you, who can I tell? You saw… what happened… with my shoulder and my back.” Cristata waited for him to nod before continuing, “Well, there was a fellow, a—oh, never mind what he does here. I liked him, and I thought he liked me. But when he got a look at some of that… he didn’t anymore.” She stared down at the floor.
“Oh.” Lanius thought, then said. “If that bothered him, you’re probably well rid of him. And besides—”
Now he was the one who stopped, much more abruptly than Cristata had. He feared he was also the one who turned red. “You’re sweet, Your Majesty,” the serving girl murmured, which meant she knew exactly what he hadn’t said. She went up the hall. He went down it, trying to convince himself nothing had happened, nothing at all.
CHAPTER NINE
The ocean was an unfamiliar world for Grus. Up until now, he’d been out upon it only a handful of times. If his river galley and the rest of the fleet sailed much farther, they would go out of sight of land. Avornan coastal traders never did anything like that. Even now, with the horizon still reassuringly jagged off to the west, he worried about making his way back to the mainland.
He worried about it, yes, but he went on, even though he increasingly had the feeling of being a bug on a plate, just waiting for someone to squash him. He didn’t see that he had much choice. To the Chernagors, the open ocean wasn’t a wasteland, a danger. It was a highway. They’d come all this way from their own country to Avornis to prey on his kingdom. He couldn’t sail back to theirs, not from here. His ships couldn’t carry enough supplies for their rowers or spread enough sail to do without those rowers. He didn’t want to think about how they would handle in a bad storm, either.
But he could—he hoped he could—convince the pirates that they couldn’t harry his coasts without paying a higher price than they wanted. As far as he knew, his men had cleared them out of all the river valleys where they’d landed. But their ships weren’t like his. They could linger offshore for a long time—exactly how long he wasn’t sure—and strike as they pleased. They could… if he didn’t persuade them that was a bad idea.
Tall and proud, the Chernagors’ ships bobbed in line ahead, not far out of bowshot. The wind had died to a light breeze, which made the river galleys more agile than the vessels from out of the north. The Chernagors wouldn’t be easy meat, though, not when their ships were crammed with fighting men. If a ramming attempt went wrong, the pirates could swarm aboard a galley and make it pay. They’d proved that in earlier fights.
Hirundo checked his sword’s edge with his thumb. He nodded to Grus. “Well, Your Majesty,” he said, “This ought to be interesting.” The river galley slid down into a trough. He jerked his hand away from the blade. He’d already cut himself once in a sudden lurch.
At the bow, the chief of the catapult crew looked back to Grus. “I think we can hit them now, Your Majesty, if we shoot on the uproll.”
“Go ahead,” Grus told him.
The crew winched back the dart and let fly. The catapult clacked as it flung the four-foot-long arrow, shaft thick as a man’s finger, toward the closest pirate ship. The dart splashed into the sea just short of its target. The Chernagors jeered.
“Give them another shot,” Grus told the sailors, who were already loading a fresh dart into the catapult.
This one thudded into the planking of the Chernagors’ ship. It did no harm, and the Chernagors went right on mocking. One or two of them tried to shoot at Grus’ ship, but their arrows didn’t come close. The catapult could outreach any mere man, no matter how strong.
Grimly, its crew reloaded once more. This time, when they shot, the great arrow skewered not one but two pirates. One splashed into the sea. The other let out a shriek Grus could hear across a quarter of a mile of water. The catapult crew raised a cheer. The Chernagors stopped laughing.
“Form line abreast and advance on the foe,” Grus told the officer in charge of signals. The pennants that gave that message fluttered along both sides of the galley. The ships to either side waved green flags to show they understood. The system had sprung to life on the Nine Rivers, and was less than perfect on the ocean. But it worked well enough. Grus saw no signals from the Chernagor ships. When had the pirates last faced anyone able to fight back?
Catapult darts flew. Every now and then, one would transfix a pirate, or two, or three. Marines at the bows of the river galleys started shooting as soon as they came close enough to the Chernagor ships.