Authors: Harry Turtledove
That got even the impassive Merovec to raise an eyebrow. “My lord?” Around King Swemmel’s court, such frankness was a commodity in short supply.
Every now and then, Rathar tired of dissembling. He’d survived such a dangerous eccentricity up till now. “Come with me,” he said abruptly, and took Merovec by the arm to make sure his adjutant could do nothing else. Once they were inside Rathar’s own sanctum, the marshal of Unkerlant closed and barred the door behind them.
“My lord?” Merovec said again.
“Are you wondering whether you’ll have to pay for being too close to me, Major?” Rathar asked, and had the dour pleasure of watching Merovec flush beneath his swarthy skin. Rathar went on, “You may well have to, but it’s too late in the game to fret over it, wouldn’t you say?”
Merovec said nothing of the sort. Merovec, in fact, said nothing at all. He stood like a statue, revealing nothing of whatever went on behind his eyes.
Aye, a perfect majordomo,
Rathar thought. As often as not, never saying much was a good way to get ahead. No one could think you disagreed with him if you acted that way. Such was certainly the key to survival at Swemmel’s court—as far as anything was the key to survival at Swemmel’s court. But Rathar, though as stolid a man as any ever born, had dared tell Swemmel to his face he thought the king was wrong. He would not keep silent now, either.
Sweeping out a hand toward the map on the wall behind his desk, he demanded of Merovec, “Do you know what my sin is in King Swemmel’s eyes?”
“Aye, my lord Marshal: you were wrong.” From Merovec, that was astounding frankness. After licking his lips, Rathar’s adjutant added, “Even worse, my lord: you were wrong twice.”
Few survived being wrong once around King Swemmel. Rathar knew as much. No courtier in Cottbus could help knowing as much. “And how was I wrong, Major?” he inquired, not altogether rhetorically.
Again, Merovec gave him a straight answer: “You underestimated Algarve. Twice, you underestimated Algarve.”
“So I did.” Rathar pointed to the map, to the new crosshatching showing that Algarve occupied Valmiera. “His Majesty wanted to assail King Mezentio while the redheads fought in the southeast, but they beat Valmiera faster than I thought they could, before we were ready. I advised waiting until they were fully embroiled with Jelgava.” He pointed to the even newer crosshatching that showed Algarve occupied Jelgava. “Now they have beaten King Donalitu faster than I thought they could. And his Majesty is furious at me for having held him back, for having held Unkerlant back.”
“Even so, my lord Marshal,” Merovec replied. “In your own words, you have stated the king’s grievance against you.”
“So I have.” Rathar nodded. “But consider this, Major: if Algarve was strong enough to overrun Valmiera faster than anyone could have imagined, if Algarve was strong enough to serve Jelgava the same way despite the mountains between them—if Algarve was strong enough to carry out those feats of arms, Major,
what would have happened to us had we in fact assailed King Mezentio’s men?”
Merovec’s face went blank. Now, though, Rathar could see below the surface. Under that mask, his adjutant’s wits were working. At last, carefully, Merovec said, “It could be, my lord, that the Algarvians would have been too heavily engaged in the east to stand against us.”
“Oh, aye, it could be,” Rathar agreed. “Would you care to bet the fate of the kingdom on its being so?”
“That is not my choice to make,” Merovec answered. “That is the king’s choice to make.”
“So it is, and he made it, and he is furious at having made it, and furious at me for having kept him from rushing ahead into a war of uncertain outcome,” Rathar said. “If I fall, I will console myself with the thought that I may well have kept the kingdom from falling instead.”
“Aye, my lord,” Merovec said. By his tone, he worried more about himself than about Unkerlant. Most men thought thus.
“I have not fallen yet,” Rathar said. “His Majesty could have taken my head in the throne room. Blood has flowed there before when the king grew wrathy enough at a former favorite. I am still here. I still command.”
“What you say is true, my lord,” Merovec replied with another bow. That was a safe answer, safe and noncommittal. Rathar’s adjutant went on, “And long may you continue to command me, my lord.” That showed a little more spirit, but only a little, for Merovec’s continued good fortune—indeed, quite possibly, Merovec’s continued survival -depended on Rathar’s.
“And, while I command, I do obey the king, even if he sometimes has trouble seeing as much,” Rathar said. “I have never said we should not war against Algarve.”
No matter how much I think so, I have never said so.
“That is not my place. My place is making sure we win the war once it begins.”
If I can. If King Swemmel lets me.
Merovec nodded. “The only one who could possibly disagree with you, my lord, is his Majesty.” He paused to let that sink in. As it did, Rathar’s mouth tightened. Merovec was, unfortunately, correct. If Swemmel took a different view of what Rathar’s position should be—if, for instance, he took the view that Rathar’s position should be kneeling, with his head on a block—that view would prevail.
“You have my leave to go,” Rathar said sourly. His adjutant bowed and departed.
Rathar turned back to the map. Maps were simple, maps were straightforward, maps made good sense. This map said—all but shouted—that, come spring, he (or whoever was Marshal of Unkerlant by then) would have no excuses left for delaying the attack against Algarve. Rathar assumed he would still command then, for no better reason than that, if he turned out to be wrong, he would probably be dead.
The war would come. Rathar saw no way of avoiding it. If he could not avoid it, he would have to win it. At the moment, he saw no sure way of doing that, either. But the sun was swinging farther north every day. Fall was here. Winter was coming. He would not have to fight then. That gave him half a year to come up with answers.
In his desk sat a squat bottle of spirits. He took it out and looked at it. He wished he could stay drunk all winter instead, as so many Unkerlanter peasants did. With a sigh, he put the bottle back. For as long as King Swemmel let him, he had plenty of work to do.
Bauska bowed to Krasta. “Here is the morning’s news sheet, milady,” she said, handing it to her mistress.
Krasta snatched it away from her. Then, peevishly, she said, “I don’t know why I bother. There’s no proper scandal in here these days. It’s all pap, the sort of pap you’d feed a sickly brat.”
“Aye, milady,” Bauska said. “That’s how the Algarvians want it to be. If the news sheets are quiet, that helps keep us quiet, too.”
Such a thought had never crossed Krasta’s mind. To her, what showed up in the news sheets simply appeared on those pages. How it got there, why it got there, what else might have got there in its place—those were questions to trouble servants, or at most tradesmen: certainly not nobles.
And then Krasta’s eye fell on a small item most of the way down the front page. It wasn’t pap, at least not to her. She read it all the way through, in mounting horror and outrage. “They dare,” she whispered. Had she not whispered, she would have shrieked. “They dare.”
“Milady?” Bauska’s face showed puzzlement. “I didn’t notice anything that would—”
“Are you blind as well as stupid?” Krasta snapped.
“Look
at this!” She held the news sheet so close to Bauska’s nose, the servant’s eyes crossed as she tried to read it.
“Mistress,” Bauska said in a hesitant voice, “the Algarvians won the war in the north, the same as they did here. King Donalitu fled from Jelgava. Of course the redheads would pick a new king in his—”
Krasta’s hand lashed out and caught her serving woman across the cheek. With a hoarse cry, Bauska staggered back across the marchioness’s bedchamber. “Fool!” Krasta hissed. “Aye, the redheads had the right to name a new king in Jelgava after Donalitu abandoned his palace. They had the right to name a king—from among his kin, or at most from among the high nobility of Jelgava. But this? Prince Mainardo? King Mezentio’s younger brother?
An Algarvian?
It is an outrage, an insult, that cannot be borne. I shall complain to the Algarvians who have forced themselves upon my household.” News sheet in hand, she swept toward the bedchamber door.
Bauska was rubbing at her cheek, already too late to have kept a red handprint from appearing. “Milady, you are still in your nightcl—” she began. Krasta slammed the door on the last part of the word.
Colonel Lurcanio, Captain Mosco, and their aides and guards and messengers were breakfasting in the wing of the mansion they had appropriated for their own. They stopped eating and drinking as suddenly as if turned to stone when Krasta burst in on them. Waving the news sheet, she cried, “What is the meaning of this?”
“I might ask the same question,” Mosco murmured, “but I think I will be content to count myself lucky instead.”
Krasta looked down at herself. She wore a simple tunic-and-trousers set of white silk—was she a commoner, to endure linen or wool when she slept? If her nipples thrust against the thin fabric, it was from outrage, not from any tender emotion. She knew no particular embarrassment at displaying herself before the Algarvians, as she knew none displaying herself before the servants—they were all equally beneath her notice.
What the Algarvians had done, though, was another matter altogether. She advanced on them, brandishing the news sheet like a cavalry saber. “How dare you set a barbarian on the ancient throne of Jelgava?” she shouted.
Colonel Lurcanio got to his feet. Bowing, he held out a hand. “If I may see this, milady?” he asked. Krasta jabbed the news sheet at him. He skimmed through the story then gave the sheet back to her. If his eyes lingered on her heaving bosom—heaving with indignation, of course—a little longer than they might have, she was too irate to notice. He said, “I trust you do not think I personally deposed King Donalitu or forced him to run away and installed Prince Mainardo in his place?”
“I don’t care what you personally did,” Krasta snapped. “That throne belongs to a Jelgavan noble, not to an Algarvian usurper. The royal family of Jelgava traces its line back to the days of the Kaunian Empire. You have no right to snuff out its claims like a stick of punk—none, do you hear me?”
“Milady, I admire your spirit,” Captain Mosco said. By the way his eyes clung, her spirit wasn’t all he admired. “I must tell you, however, that—”
“Wait,” Lurcanio said. ”
I
will deal with this.” Mosco bowed in his seat, acknowledging his superior’s prerogative. Turning back to Krasta, Lurcanio went on, “Milady, let us understand each other. I care not a fig whether or not the king—the former king, the fled king—of Jelgava traces his descent back to the days of the Kaunian Empire or, for that matter, back to the egg from which the world hatched. Algarvians overthrew the Kaunian Empire, and our chieftains became kings. Now we have overthrown Jelgava, and our prince becomes a king. We have the strength, so of course we have the right.”
Krasta slapped him, just as she had slapped Bauska moments before. The reaction was completely automatic. He had displeased her, and therefore deserved whatever she chose to give him.
Her servants accepted that as a law of nature almost to the same degree she did. Lurcanio was cut from a different bolt of cloth. He hauled off and slapped Krasta in return, hard enough to send her staggering back several steps.
She stared at him in astonishment complete and absolute. Her parents had died when she was quite small. Since then, no one had presumed to lay a hand on her, or indeed to check her in any way. Bowing to her, Lurcanio said, “I assure you, milady, that I would never be so rude as to strike a woman unprovoked. But I also assure you that I do not suffer myself to be struck, either. You would do well—you would do very well—to remember as much from now on.”
Slowly, Krasta raised a hand to her mouth. She tasted blood; one of her teeth had torn the inside of her cheek. “How dare you do that?” she whispered. The question held more simple curiosity than anger: so novel was receiving what she’d been in the habit of giving out.
Colonel Lurcanio bowed again, perhaps recognizing as much. When he replied, he might have been a schoolmaster: “It is as I said before, milady. I have the will and I have the strength, both in my own person and in my kingdom, to punish insults offered me. Having the strength gives me the right, and I am not ashamed to use it.”
At first, he might have been speaking the horrid language of the Ice People for all the sense he made to Krasta. And then, suddenly, his words hit her with a force greater than that of his hand.
Valmiera had lost the war.
Krasta had already known that, of course. Up till now, though, it had been only an annoyance, an inconvenience. For the first time, what it meant crashed down on her. Up till now, she’d granted deference only to the tiny handful above her in the hierarchy: counts and countesses, dukes and duchesses, the royal family. But the Algarvians, by virtue of their victory, also outranked her in this strange new Valmiera. As Lurcanio had said—and had proved with his hard right hand—they had the power to do as they pleased here. That power had been hers and her ancestors’ since time out of mind. It was no longer, unless the redheads chose to allow it.
Colonel Lurcanio might be a count in his own kingdom. Here in Valmiera, he counted for a prince or at least a duke, for he was King Mezentio’s man. Krasta tried to imagine what would have become of her had she slapped a duke in King Gainibu’s palace: a duke, that is, who had not tried to slide his hand inside her tunic or under the waistband of her trousers.
She would have been ruined. There was no other possible answer. Which meant she’d run the risk of ruin by slapping Lurcanio. He might have done far worse to her than he had. “I—I’m sorry,” she said. The words came hard; she was not in the habit of apologizing.
She took a deep breath, preparatory to saying more. Colonel Lurcanio and Captain Mosco appreciatively watched her taking that deep breath. She saw them watching her, and looked down at herself once more. If they were her superiors in rank and she stood in dishabille before them