She was right. Lanius knew as much. He passed off most of Ortalis' gibes with a smile and a nod — if his brother-in-law didn't see him angry, he had less incentive to sting again. "This was just too raw to ignore," he muttered.
"It shouldn't have been." Sosia was doing her best to seem quiet and reasonable, the role Lanius usually took for himself. She continued, "It's not even so much that he was wrong, even if he was rude. Training that moncat doesn't seem like much next to besieging Yozgat."
"Not you, too!" Lanius shouted. Sosia stared at him in astonishment complete and absolute. He was as furious as she'd been when she caught him with each new serving girl. She was usually the one who yelled and threw things. Now he looked around for the closest missile, and she was lucky he didn't find one ready to hand.
"What's the matter?" she asked helplessly. "What did I say?"
"You're as bad as your brother!" Lanius roared. He didn't calculate that to wound, but it did the job. He rushed out of the bedchamber and slammed the door behind him.
Servants scattered like frightened little birds when they saw his face. If they hadn't scattered, he would have walked over them or through them. Once he got to the archives, he stormed in as fiercely as he'd swarmed out of the royal bedchamber. He slammed that door behind him, too. The boom echoed through the vast hall.
Once the echoes faded, he found himself in the midst of silence. Whatever waited outside couldn't touch him here. He knew what he'd done for Avornis. Grus also knew what he'd done for Avornis, even if the other king sometimes needed reminding. If no one in the palace knew…
It's because you haven't told anyone here, Lanius thought. He knew why he hadn't, too. The less he said, the less other people knew, the better for the kingdom. The better for the kingdom, yes, but the harder for him. He'd just painfully run into that. Until he ran into it, he didn't realize how hard it would be.
Soldiers made great swarms of hurdles from brash and branches. They piled them out of fire-arrow range of the walls of Yozgat.
Grus didn't know if he was going to try to storm Korkut's capital. If he did, he would need some way to cross the moat. Hurdles, he thought, gave his men the best chance.
The Menteshe had already tried to run barges piled high with sacks of grain under the walls. The Avornans had captured some and burned others. A few had managed to unload their supplies.
That wouldn't happen anymore — or Grus hoped with all his heart it wouldn't, anyhow. Now, along with the stone- and dart-throwers by the riverbank, he had boats on the river, too. They weren't proper river galleys. They were what his men could capture and what his carpenters could knock together with the timber they found locally. They floated, and he could fill them with archers and spearmen. As far as he knew, the Menteshe didn't have any river galleys in these parts, either. Up until now, why would they have needed them here?
Korkut's men seemed alert. They shot from the top of the wall. Every so often, one of their arrows would hit an Avornan. Grus' artificers set up more and more catapults that bore on the walls. Every so often, one of their darts would pierce a Menteshe or one of their stones would smash a man or two flat. Neither side did the other much harm. Each reminded the other it was still in the fight and still serious about it.
Grus' engineers began digging to see if they could undermine Yozgat's walls the way they had with Trabzun's. They reported to him with long faces. "Won't be easy, Your Majesty," one of them said. "Soil's pretty soft, and the water from the moat seeps on down. I don't see how we can keep a tunnel dry."
He listened, he thanked them, and then he summoned Pterocles. After describing the problem, he asked, "What can you do about it?"
The wizard frowned. "I'm not sure I have a spell strong enough to shore up the bottom of a moat. Even if I did, it wouldn't be something I could keep the Menteshe from noticing. There are quiet magics and loud ones, if you know what I mean. That sort of thing couldn't be louder if I yelled at the top of my lungs."
Grus grunted discontentedly. He'd asked for miracles from Pterocles, and he'd gotten a lot of them. No wasn't what he wanted to hear. He asked, "Could you come up with something new?"
"Maybe," Pterocles said. "Do you want to send me back to the city of Avornis and let me do somewhere between six months and six years of research? By the time I'm done, I may have something worthwhile. I may, mind you — I can't promise anything."
That was no again, a polite no, but no all the same. Grus liked it no better than he had before. "Do you think any of the other wizards with the army will give me a different answer?" he inquired.
"Some of them may," Pterocles answered. Grus brightened — until the sorcerer went on, "I don't think they'll be telling the truth if they do, though. But some people do like to let you think they can do more than they really can."
That was depressingly true. Grus had seen it more times than he could count. Just to check, he called in several other wizards and asked what they could do about the moat. Sure enough, one man promised everything but to drink it dry with a hollow reed. Grus asked him several pointed questions and found out he knew less than he pretended.
Quailing, the wizard asked, "What are you going to do to me, Your Majesty?"
"I ought to give you a good kick in the backside for wasting my time," the king answered. "Go on, though — get out of here. I've seen that you can cure thralls. Stick to that. If you want to tell tales, tell them to your grandchildren when you have some." Chastened, the wizard hurried away.
Once he was gone, Grus called Hirundo and said, "I'm afraid we're going to have to do it the hard way."
"I didn't really expect anything else, Your Majesty," the general replied. "Did you?"
"Well, I hoped for something better, anyhow." Grus eyed Yozgat's formidable defenses. "Breaking in won't be easy."
"If it were easy, somebody would have done it a long time ago," Hirundo said. "One way or another, we'll come up with something."
As usual, Grus admired his optimism. Also as usual, the king had trouble matching it. But his own spirits rose when he got a letter from Lanius telling him Sosia was expecting another baby. Up there in the north, life went on. And one reason it went on was because of what he was doing down here. Even if he didn't take the Scepter of Mercy, the Menteshe would be too busy on their own soil to trouble Avornis for a long time to come.
Grus shook his head. That wasn't the right way to look at things. He was giving himself a comfortable excuse for failing. He didn't need that, and neither did the army. He hadn't come all the way down to Yozgat to fail. One way or another, he and the army had come up with something, again and again and again. Once more? Why not? Maybe Hirundo had the right idea after all.
But Grus also knew he hadn't been exaggerating or sounding a note of gloom and doom. Breaking into Yozgat wouldn't be easy. The city was well fortified, and the defenders seemed in good spirits — or maybe they just feared what the Banished One would do to them if they let the place fall. Either way, they weren't going to throw down their bows and their spears and surrender, however much he wished they would. He would have to get them out and get his men in.
"How?" he wondered aloud. He couldn't go under the moat — that seemed all too clear. His soldiers couldn't sprout wings and fly, either. He didn't even waste his time and Pterocles' asking about such impossibilities. That left storming the city, which wasn't impossible in the same sense of the word as the other two choices, but which didn't look very promising, either.
Or we can starve the Menteshe out — if we can starve them out, Grus thought. He had no idea what his chances there were. He did know keeping his own army supplied would be none too easy. The nomads would do everything they could to disrupt grain shipments from the north. They would probably bum or trample as many nearby crops as they could, too.