“I’ll tell you what they do,” Hirundo answered. “They do without.”
Another joke that held entirely too much truth. The trouble was that people couldn’t very well do without wine and raisins and grapes and olive oil. Here in the south, those things were almost as important as wheat and barley—not that the grainfields hadn’t been ravaged, too. A good harvest next year would go a long way toward putting that worry behind people… provided they didn’t starve in the meantime. But the other crops would take longer to recover.
“And what happens if the Menteshe swarm over the Stura again next spring?” Grus demanded.
“We try to hit them before they can cause anywhere near this much mischief,” Hirundo answered reasonably.
“But can we really do it? Wouldn’t you rather go up into the Chernagor country and finish what we’ve been trying to do there for years now? And what about the Chernagor pirates? What if they hit our east coast again next spring while the Menteshe cross the Stura?”
“You’re full of cheerful ideas,” Hirundo said.
“It could have happened this year,” Grus said. “We’re lucky it didn’t.”
Hirundo shook his head. “That isn’t just luck, Your Majesty. True, you didn’t take Nishevatz, but you came close, and you would have done it, odds are, if the war down here hadn’t drawn you away. And our ships gave the Chernagor pirates all they wanted, and more besides. It’s no wonder they didn’t move along with the cursed Menteshe. You put the fear of the gods in them.”
“The fear of the gods,” Grus murmured. He hoped some of the Chernagors still felt it, as opposed to the fear of the Banished One. But what he hoped and what was true were liable to be two different things, as he knew too well. Confusing the one with the other could only lead to disappointment.
As he was getting ready to lie down on his cot that evening, Alauda said, “Ask you something, Your Majesty?”
Grus looked at her in surprise. She didn’t ask a lot of questions. “Go ahead,” the king said after a moment. “You can always ask. I don’t know that I’ll answer.”
The peasant girl’s smile was wry. “I understand. You don’t have to, not for the likes of me. But when we were up in Pelagonia… You had another woman up there, didn’t you?”
“Not another woman I slept with,” Grus said carefully. He’d had enough rows with women (that a lot of those rows were his own fault never crossed his mind). He didn’t want another one now. If he had to send Alauda somewhere far away to keep from having another one, he was ruthlessly ready to do that.
But she only shrugged. “Another woman you care about, I mean. I don’t know if you slept with her or not.” She waited. Grus gave her a cautious nod. She went on, “And you’d cared about her for a while now,” and waited again. Again, the king nodded. Now he waited. Alauda licked her lips and then asked, “Why didn’t you just throw me over for her, then?” That was what she’d really wanted to know all along.
I intended to. But Grus didn’t say that. He got in trouble over women because he took them to bed whenever he got the chance, not because he was wantonly cruel. What he did say was, “We aren’t lovers anymore. We used to be, but we aren’t.”
Alauda surprised him again, this time by laughing. “When we got there, you thought you were going to be, though, didn’t you?”
“Well… yes,” he said in dull embarrassment. He hadn’t thought she’d noticed that. Now he asked a question of his own. “Why didn’t you bring up any of this when we were there?”
She laughed once more, on a self-deprecating note. “What good would it have done me? None I could see. Safer now, when I’m here and she’s not.”
She did have her share of shrewdness. Grus had seen that before. “Now you know,” he said, although he’d told her as little as he could. He changed the subject, asking, “How are you feeling?”
“I’m all right,” she answered. “I’m supposed to have babies. I’m made for it. It’s not always comfortable—about half the time, breakfast doesn’t want to stay down—but I’m all right. Is the war going as well as it looks?”
“Almost,” Grus said. “We’re still going forward, anyhow. I hope we’ll keep on doing it.”
“Once we chase all the Menteshe out of Avornis, how do we keep them out for good?” Alauda asked.
“I don’t know,” Grus said, which made her blink. He went on, “Avornans have been trying to find the answer to that for a long time, but we haven’t done it yet. If we had, they wouldn’t be in Avornis now, would they?” He waited for Alauda to shake her head, then added, “One thing I can do—one thing I will do—is put more river galleys on the Stura. That will make it harder for them to cross, anyhow.”
She nodded. “That makes good sense. Why weren’t there more river galleys on the Stura before?”
“They’re expensive,” he answered. “Expensive to build, even more expensive to man.” The tall-masted ships that aped the ones the Chernagor pirates made cost more to build. River galleys, with their large crews of rowers, cost more to maintain. And every man who became a sailor was one more man who couldn’t till the soil. After the disasters of this war, Avornis was liable to need farmers even more desperately than she needed soldiers or sailors. The king hoped she could find enough. If not, lean times were coming, in the most literal sense of the words.
Lanius liked coming into the kitchens. He nodded to the head cook, a rotund man named Cucullatus. “Tomorrow is Queen Sosia’s birthday, you know,” he said. “Do up something special for her.”
Cucullatus’ smile was almost as wide as he was, which said a good deal. “How about a kidney pie, Your Majesty? That’s one of her favorites.”
“Fine.” Lanius hoped his own smile was also wide and seemed sincere. Sosia did love kidney pie, or any other dish with kidneys in it. Lanius didn’t. To him, cooked kidneys smelled nasty. But he did want to make his wife happy. He worked harder to keep Sosia happy since he’d started taking lovers among the serving women than he had before. He thought himself unique in that regard, which only proved he didn’t know everything there was to know about straying husbands.
“We’ll take care of it, Your Majesty,” Cucullatus promised. “And whatever kidneys don’t go into the pie, we’ll save for the moncats.”
“Fine,” Lanius said again, this time with real enthusiasm. The moncats loved kidneys, which didn’t stink nearly as much raw.
The king started to leave the kitchens. A startled noise from one of the sweepers made him turn back. There was Pouncer, clinging to a beam with one clawed hand. The moncat’s other hand clutched a big wooden spoon. Reading moncats’ expressions was a risky game, but Lanius thought Pouncer looked almost indecently pleased with itself.
“Come back here! Come down here!” the king called in stern tones. But Pouncer was no better at doing what it was told than any other moncat—or any other cat of any sort.
Cucullatus said, “Here, don’t worry, Your Majesty. We can lure it down with a bit of meat.”
“Good idea,” Lanius said. But the sweeper who’d first spotted Pouncer wasn’t paying any attention to either Cucullatus or the king. He tried to knock the moncat from the beam with his broom. He missed. Pouncer yowled and swung up onto the beam, with only its tail hanging down. The sweeper sprang, trying to grab the tail. He jumped just high enough to pull out a few of the hairs at the very end. Pouncer yowled again, louder this time, and took off like a dart hurled from a catapult.