The Scepter's Return by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page A

got. Not only villages had fallen to the Menteshe. So had more than one walled city. The nomads didn’t have elaborate siege trains, the way the Avornan army did. But if they burned the fields around a city, slaughtered the livestock, and killed the peasants who raised the crops, the townsfolk inside the walls got hungry. Then they had two choices—they could starve or open their gates to the Menteshe and hope for the best.
    Sometimes starving turned out to be the better idea.
    Otus rode close to King Grus. The former thrall stared at the countryside with wide eyes, as he had ever since leaving the capital. “This land is so rich,” he said.
    â€œHere? By the gods, no!” Grus shook his head. “What we saw farther north, that was fine country. This used to be. It will be again, once people finish getting over the latest invasion. But it’s nothing special now.”
    â€œEven the way it is, it’s better than you’ll find on the other side of the river.” Otus pointed south. “Farmers who care work this land. They do everything they can with it, even when that is not so much. Over there”—he pointed again—“you might as well have so many cattle tilling the soil. Nobody does anything but what he has to. The people—the thralls, I mean—don’t see half of what they ought to do.”
    If things went wrong on the far side of the Stura, the whole army—or however much of it was left alive after the Menteshe got through with it—would probably be made into thralls. It had happened before. A King of Avornis had lived out his days dead of soul in a little peasant hut somewhere between the Stura and Yozgat. After that, no Avornan army had presumed to cross the last river … until now.
    Was the Banished One laughing and rubbing his hands together, looking forward to another easy triumph? Had everything that had happened over the past few years, including the civil strife among the Menteshe, been nothing but a ruse to lure Grus and the Avornan army down over the Stura? Could the Banished One see that far ahead? Could he move the pieces on the board so precisely? Was Pterocles’ thrall-freeing sorcery all part of the ruse?
    Grus shook his head. If the exiled god could do all that, there was no hope of resisting him. But if he could do all that, he would have crushed Avornis centuries earlier. Whatever he’d been in the heavens, he had limits in the material world. He could be opposed. He could be beaten. Otherwise, the Chernagors would bow down to him as the Fallen Star, the way the Menteshe did. Grus’ campaigns in the north had made sure that wouldn’t happen.
    Sunlight glinted off water in the distance. A smudge of smoke near the Stura marked the city of Anna. The king knew the town well from his days as a river-galley captain. It hadn’t fallen to the nomads, even when things seemed blackest for Avornis. Lying on the broad river, it depended less on nearby fields for food than towns farther from the Stura. And archers and catapults on river galleys had taken their toll on the Menteshe who ventured too close to the bank.
    Anna was used to soldiers and sailors. It was always heavily garrisoned. Any king with eyes to see knew the border towns stood as bulwarks against trouble from the south. A great flotilla of river galleys patrolled the Stura now. The river had tributaries that flowed in from the south as well as from the north. They hadn’t seen Avornan ships on them for many, many years. Soon they would again.
    Along with Hirundo, Grus stood on Anna’s riverfront wall, peering south into the land where no Avornan soldiers had willingly set foot for so very long. It looked little different from the country on this side of the Stura. Off in the distance stood a peasant village. It was full of thralls, of course. From this distance, it looked the same as an ordinary Avornan village in spite of what Otus said. No matter