Riders came galloping back from the direction of the river. “Thervings!” they shouted. “A whole great swarm of Thervings!”
Grus looked at Hirundo. “Well, General,” the king said, “now we have to make sure we don’t get overrun and massacred, don’t we?”
“That would be nice,” Hirundo agreed.
Horns screamed out commands to shift from marching column into line of battle. The men obeyed the trumpets—and their officers’ bellowed orders—without fuss and without worry, or at least with no outward show of it. Grus watched them closely. He liked what he saw. Turning to Hirundo, he said, “They’re ready enough.”
“Yes, I think so, too,” the general replied. “Pretty soon, we’ll find out how ready the Thervings are.”
They didn’t have to wait long. The Thervings came forward already in line of battle. The sun glinted from spearheads and sword blades and helmets and chainmail shirts. The Thervings howled like wolves and roared like tigers. They actively liked to fight. That seemed very strange to Grus. He didn’t know a single Avornan to whom it didn’t seem strange. Liking to fight was a sure hallmark of barbarians—the Menteshe did, too.
Like it or not, the Avornans sometimes had to fight. This was one of those times: Fight or run away. They’d done too much running, and suffered too much for it. Not liking to fight didn’t mean they couldn’t. Grus hoped it didn’t, anyhow. If it did, he was in a lot of trouble.
“Forward!” he shouted, and pointed to the trumpeters. Their horns blared out the same message.
And the Avornan soldiers, horse and foot, went forward. They shouted Grus’ name, and Lanius‘, and Hirundo’s, and that of Avornis itself. The first time Grus heard men shouting his name, the hair had stood up on the back of his neck with awe and pride. Now that he’d been at the game for a while, he gauged other things, such as how ready to fight they sounded. Again, he found nothing about which to complain.
King Dagipert’s men always sounded ready. They sounded so very ready, no sane soldier should have wanted to face them. Grus, sword in hand, wondered what he was doing here. Then he shrugged. If he fell, Ortalis would doubtless try to rule. If Ortalis could, he would. If he couldn’t, Lanius would. Who would get rid of whom? Either way, my line goes on, the king thought.
He wanted to go on himself. But here he was on horseback, brandishing that sword, galloping toward men who wanted nothing more than to kill him—unless, of course, it was to torture him and then kill him. A sensible man would have galloped in the other direction. Lanius was sensible. Grus, or some large part of him, wished he were.
A big, burly, bearded, braided Therving stood in front of him, holding his ax in both hands. The Therving swung up the ax at the same time as Grus drew back his sword. They both tried to kill each other at the same time, too. The Therving’s ax stroke missed—missed by what couldn’t have been the thickness of a hair. Grus’ sword bit. The Therving howled.
And then Grus was past, and hacking and slashing at more of Dagipert’s soldiers. By himself, he was no great warrior, as he knew too well. But he wasn’t by himself. He headed hundreds of horsemen, most of them shouting his name. At their head, he was something larger, grander, and altogether more menacing than an ordinary soldier. He and his riders drove deep into the Thervings’ ranks, as though nothing in the world—certainly not the men from the Bantian Mountains—could stop them.
This time, that turned out to be true. For a while, the Thervings fought with all their usual ferocity. But they weren’t used to meeting Avornans who fought at least as savagely as they did. When Grus and his men kept going forward in spite of all the Thervings could do to stop them, panic seeped through the enemy’s ranks.
All at once, Grus wasn’t striking at men who were trying to cut him down. All at once, there were only Therving backs before him, as Dagipert’s host broke and fled.
Half an hour later, his horse stood panting at the eastern bank of the Tuola. Therving corpses lay scattered from the battlefield all the way to the riverbank. If Dagipert’s men hadn’t had boats in the river, none of them would have gotten away. Grus paused for a long, deep breath. “They won’t cross back this year, by the gods,” he said. The men with him cheered.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Lanius had seen Prince Ortalis in a lot of different moods—sullen, sulky, angry, nasty, vicious, cruel. He couldn’t ever remember seeing Ortalis with a simple smile of pleasure on his handsome face. “Great sport!” Lanius’ brother-in-law exclaimed. “By King Olor’s strong right hand, there’s no better sport in all the world.”
“What’s that, Your Highness?” Normally, Lanius said as little as he could to Ortalis. Seeing Grus’ son without a sneer on his face, though, made him break his own rule.
“Why, the boar I killed this morning,” Ortalis answered. “Would you care to come hunting with me one of these days, Your Majesty?”
He didn’t even sound as though he wanted Lanius to be his quarry. He seemed for all the world a man who’d found something he enjoyed and wanted someone he knew to enjoy it, too. To Lanius, though, it was no wonder boar and bore sounded alike. He shook his head. “No, thanks,” he told Ortalis. But then he had the wit to add, “Maybe you’ll tell me about the hunt you’re just back from.”
Ortalis did, in alarming detail. Lanius heard all about flushing the boar from the brush in which it hid, about chasing it on horseback through the woods, about the way its tushes had ripped the guts out of one hunting dog and scored a great wound in another’s flank, how Ortalis’ spear had gone in just behind the shoulder, how the boar had struggled and bled and finally died.
“Then the beaters and I butchered it,” Ortalis finished. He laughed and held up his hands. “I’ve still got blood under my nails. And how does roast boar sound for supper tonight?” He smacked his lips to show what he thought.
Roast boar sounded good to Lanius, too, and he said so. Prince Ortalis went off, whistling a cheery tune.
He still likes the blood, Lanius thought. It’s in his soul, not just under his fingernails. But if he’s killing beasts, maybe that will keep him happy— and keep him from wanting to do anything worse. By the gods, maybe it will.
When he went to tell Sosia what he’d seen and what he thought of it, she nodded. “Mother and I have been trying to talk Ortalis into going hunting for a while now—Father, too, before he went out on campaign. We had to do it a little at a time, for fear of making him think we were trying to push him into it.”
“That’s… sneaky,” Lanius said. “It’s a good idea, though, I think. Who came up with it?”
“Father did,” Sosia answered. “Mother thought it was a good notion, too, but Father was the one who had it.”
“I might have known,” Lanius muttered. Grus had a knack for figuring out how to get the better of people—if not one way, then another. Lanius sighed. He’s certainly gotten the better of me.
He glanced over to Sosia. “How do you feel?” he asked. Her belly bulged enormously. The baby would come before long.
“I just want it to be done,” she said, and then, sharply, “Stop that!” She looked up at Lanius. “He’s kicking me again.”