CHAPTER EIGHT
A bird sang in the gardens around the palace. Lanius wondered what sort of bird it was. Some people could tell one bird from another by the briefest snatch of song. The king wasn't one of them. He knew a hawk from a heron, but not much more, not by note alone.
I could learn, he thought. I could, if I had the time. But that was a formidable challenge. He already had hobbies – the moncats, the archives, serving girls every now and then. When he was younger, he'd taught himself to draw and paint, but he didn't have the time to stay sharp at that. Being a king swallowed more hours than he wished it did.
The bird went on singing. It didn't care whether he knew what it was. It was singing for the joy of it, or maybe to find a mate – which involved a different kind of joy.
Sosia looked across the breakfast table at Lanius. "I just asked you a question," she said pointedly. "Didn't you hear me?"
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't. I'm afraid I was listening to the bird outside."
She gave him the withering glance wives reserve for husbands who aren't all they might be. "I might have known," she said. "How many times have I caught you with your head in the clouds?"
"It wasn't in the clouds," Lanius protested. "Just in the garden."
"Better there than some places," Sosia said. She knew about his occasional hobby, and didn't like it. She also thought it more occasional than it was. She would have liked it even less if she'd known more about it. With exaggerated patience, she repeated herself. "I said, have you been paying attention to the company my brother's been keeping lately?"
Lanius shook his head. "I generally try not to pay attention to the company your brother keeps, unless you mean Anser. Wouldn't you say it's more Limosa's worry than mine, anyhow?"
Sosia made an exasperated noise. "Not that kind of company." The hooded glance she sent him said she thought he knew too much about that kind of company himself. With an obvious effort, she made herself put that thought aside. She went on, "I meant some of the young officers he's been drinking with."
"Ortalis?" Lanius said in surprise. His wife nodded. He took a sip of wine while he thought. "Three things occur to me." He ticked them off on his fingers. "Maybe they're men with pretty sisters – or pretty wives. Maybe they're men who like to hunt. Or maybe, knowing Ortalis, they're men with, ah, peculiar tastes."
"I'd think he's chatted up enough of them to make that last unlikely – although you never can tell." Sosia's mouth twisted in distaste. "The other two? Maybe. There's something else, though – something you're not seeing."
"What?" Lanius asked in real perplexity. He thought he'd thought of everything. He took pride in thinking of as many things as he could.
But Sosia found something he'd missed. "Maybe he's plotting with them."
"Ortalis?" Now Lanius all but squeaked in surprise. "He's done a lot of nasty things, but they're all nasty because he is what he is. They're not nasty because he's after the crown."
"Not yet," his wife said grimly. "But if Limosa has a boy… He may care more on account of his children than he does for himself. Plenty of people are like that."
Lanius couldn't tell her she was wrong, for he knew she wasn't. He said, "Well, I'll keep an eye on it." He didn't mean he'd spy on Ortalis himself. He had palace servants he trusted to take care of that for him. "If he's talking with young officers, he can't mean too much by it. He'd be talking with their superiors if he did."
"Maybe," Sosia said again. Again, she didn't sound as though she believed it. "Sometimes, though, if you get the junior officers on your side, they'll bring the senior officers with them."
Once more, Lanius couldn't tell her she was wrong. He said, "You can come up with things like that, because you're as sly as your father." He seldom praised Grus' cleverness, but he knew he couldn't ignore it. "But Ortalis?" He shook his head. "Say what you want about your brother, but nobody's ever accused him of being subtle."
"If he were subtle, I wouldn't know what he was doing, would I?" his wife retorted. "Even if he's not subtle, that doesn't mean he's not dangerous."
"We'll see what's going on, that's all." Lanius could easily imagine Ortalis as dangerous to him in a fit of temper. Imagining his brother-in-law as dangerous in a conspiracy was something else again.
Sosia scowled at him. "You don't believe me. You don't want to believe me. You'd sooner pay attention to the stupid bird that was singing out there."
"I've lived in the palace my whole life," Lanius answered. "I like to think I have some idea when trouble's brewing and when it isn't. Just because I don't agree that Ortalis is doing something particularly bad doesn't mean I'm not paying attention to you."
"You weren't before," Sosia reminded him. "Not very long before, either."
"I am now, though. I have been." Lanius did his best to seem virtuous and innocent. He must have succeeded; his wife stopped nagging him.
Flies buzzed through the Avornan encirclement of Trabzun. Grus ignored them when he could and slapped at them when he couldn't. With all the garbage and sewage accumulating as his army besieged the town, he couldn't be surprised the bugs were bad. If anything, they could have been worse.
Grus made a point of appearing now here, now there, all around the encirclement. He wanted the Menteshe to notice him and to wonder what sort of scheme he was plotting. The only thing he didn't want them to do was come up with the right answer.
Shielded – Grus hoped – by Pterocles' masking spell, sappers dug down toward the walls of Trabzun. The king showed himself to the Menteshe there as often as he did anywhere else. "Shouldn't you stay away from this part of the line, Your Majesty?" Hirundo asked him after one of those appearances.
He shook his head. "I don't think so. If I show myself around four fifths of the circle but not right here, the garrison will start wondering why. If I show myself all the way around, they won't care more about one stretch of the line than any other."
Hirundo thought that over. He overacted thinking it over, in fact; he grunted and stroked his chin and stared up into the sky. At last, reluctantly, he nodded. "You've got a complicated way of looking at the world, haven't you?" he said.
"It's a complicated place," Grus answered. "Making things as simple as you can is good. Making them too simple isn't."
"How do you tell the difference?" The general sounded genuinely curious.
"Well, if you start making a lot of mistakes, you probably think things are simpler than they really are," Grus said.
Hirundo started to say something else. Before he could, a soldier ran toward Grus and him shouting, "Your Majesty! General! Your Majesty!"
"I don't know that I like the sound of that," Hirundo said.
"I do know that I don't like it a bit. Something's gone wrong somewhere." Grus raised his voice and waved to the soldier. "We're here. What is it?"
"Your Majesty, there's a good-sized Menteshe army coming up from the south," the man replied.
"Well, we knew that was liable to happen," Hirundo said.
"So we did," Grus agreed. "We've done what we could to get ready for it, too. Now we get to see how good a job that was."
"I'd better go out to the outer works and have a look for myself," Hirundo said.
"I'll come, too," the king told him. "If I start joggling your elbow, don't be shy about letting me know."
"Everyone knows how shy and retiring I am, Your Majesty," Hirundo replied. "People have been talking about it for years." He didn't even try to pretend that Grus should take him seriously. He knew better. Grus didn't say anything. He just rolled his eyes and went along with the general.
He made sure trumpeters came with them, too. He didn't know what orders Hirundo would give, but he had a pretty good notion. Trumpeters would spread the word far faster than runners could.