Authors: Harry Turtledove
“We have owed most of our neighbors for a long time, my lord count,” King Mezentio said. “We shall pay them back, too.” As Sabrino had done from time to time, he turned and looked toward the west.
“Can it be done, your Majesty?” Sabrino asked quietly.
“If you doubt it, sir, I invite you to return to your estate and leave the doing to those who have no doubts,” Mezentio said, and Sabrino’s ears burned. The king continued, “We have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”
Sabrino stared. A couple of high-ranking officers had used those very words not long after Forthweg fell. Then, Sabrino had had no way of knowing what they were talking about. Now, a good many rotten structures already having come crashing down, he could see only one still standing. How long, he suddenly wondered, had Mezentio been preparing for the day when war would break out again? The Kaunian kingdoms had declared war on Algarve, but Algarve was the kingdom that had been ready to fight.
Sabrino raised his goblet high. “To his Majesty!” he exclaimed.
Everyone drank. Not to drink a toast to the king of Algarve would have been unthinkable. But Mezentio’s hazel eyes glinted as he acknowledged the honor Sabrino and the salon full of notables had done him. He studied the dragonflier, then slowly nodded. Sabrino was convinced the king knew what he was thinking, and was telling him he was right. Asking any more would have been asking Mezentio to say too much. Mezentio might already have said too much, for those with ears to hear.
Not everyone had such ears. Sabrino had already insulted one pretty girl close to the king by not explaining what she thought she had the right to know. The other young woman there did not ask him to enlighten her. Instead, she chose an official from the ministry of finance. The fellow was plainly flattered to gain her attentions, but as plainly understood no more of what Mezentio had said and what he’d implied than she did.
Laughing a little to himself, Sabrino slipped off toward a sideboard and took another glass of wine. The pleasure that filled him, though, had little to do with what he’d drunk and what he was drinking. As Mezentio had done, he looked west. Slowly, he nodded. Algarve had been a long time finding her place in the sun. All her neighbors had tried to hold her down, hold her back. Once the Derlavaian War came to a proper end, though, they wouldn’t be able to do that any more.
Never again,
Sabrino thought, echoing Mezentio. He was old enough to remember the humiliation and the chaos that followed the loss of the Six Years’ War.
Never again,
he thought once more. Victory was better. Whatever victory required, he wanted Algarve to do.
You can’t make war halfheartedly,
he thought. As if that needed proving, Valmiera and Jelgava had proved it to the hilt. And now, as King Mezentio had said, they were paying the price. Well, Algarve had paid. It was their turn.
Someone not far away shouted angrily. Sabrino turned his head. A Yaninan in shoes with decorative pompoms, tights, and a puffy-sleeved tunic was waving his finger in an Algarvian’s face. “You are wrong, I tell you!” the Yaninan said. “I tell you, I was up by the Raffali River myself last week, and the weather was sunny—warm and sunny.”
“You are mistaken, sir,” the Algarvian said. “It rained. It rained nearly every day—quite spoiled the horseback ride I had planned.”
“You call me a liar at your peril,” the Yaninan said; his folk took slights even more seriously than Algarvians did.
“I do not call you a liar,” the redheaded noble replied with a yawn. “A senile fool who cannot recall today what happened yesterday: that, most assuredly. But not a liar.”
With a screech, the Yaninan flung his drink in the Algarvian’s face. Among Algarvians, their friends would have made arrangements for them to meet again. The Yaninan was too impatient to wait. He hit his foe in the belly, and then a glancing blow off the side of his head.
The Algarvian grappled with him, pulled him down, and started pummeling him. The Yaninan didn’t like that so well, as his foe was about half again as big as he was. By the time Sabrino and the other men pulled the Algarvian off him, he was more than a little worse for wear.
“You would be well advised to learn some manners,” the Algarvian told him.
“You would be well advised to—” the Yaninan began as he climbed to his feet.
“Shall I give you another lesson on why you would be well advised to learn manners?” the Algarvian asked, as politely as if he were offering another glass of brandy punch rather than another punch in the eye. The Yaninan did not lack spirit, but he didn’t altogether lack sense, either. Instead of starting up the fight again, he took himself elsewhere.
Sabrino bowed to the Algarvian victor, saying, “Well done, sir. Well done.”
“You do me too much honor.” His countryman returned the bow. “All these westerners—if you take a firm line with them, they are yours to command.”
“Aye.” Sabrino laughed. “That is the way of it, sure enough.”
Marshal Rathar strolled through King Swemmel Square, which was said to be the largest paved-over open space in the world. He had no idea whether that was true, or whether everything associated with King Swemmel had to be the biggest or the most of whatever it was simply because of its association with the king. He wondered whether anyone had actually measured all the great plazas of the world and compared them one to another. Then he wondered why he worried his head about such unimportant things. It wasn’t as if he had not important things about which to worry.
A wind howling up from the south blew little flurries of snow into his face. He pulled his cloak more tightly around him, and tugged the hood down low on his forehead. The cloak was the rock-gray of Unkerlanter army issue, but, unlike the long tunic beneath it, did not show his rank. Thus swaddled, he could have been anyone. He enjoyed his few minutes of anonymity. All too soon, he would have to return to the palace, return to his work, return to the knowledge that King Swemmel might order him dragged off to the headsman at any time.
Statues of past Unkerlanter kings, some in stone, some in bronze, marked the outer boundary of the square. One statue towered twice as tall as any of the others. Rathar did not need to glance at it to know it was made in King Swemmel’s image. Swemmel’s successor would no doubt knock it down. Maybe he would replace it with one to match the others in size. Maybe, having knocked it down, Swemmel’s successor would not replace it at all.
Under the shielding hood, Rathar shook his head. He might have been a man bedeviled by gnats, but no gnats could withstand Cottbus’s winter weather. No, he knew what he was: a man bedeviled by his own thoughts. Those were harder to shake off than gnats, and more dangerous, too.
He sighed. “I had better get back to it,” he muttered. If he buried himself in work, he would not—he hoped he would not—have much time to think about King Swemmel the man even as he carried out the orders of King Swemmel the sovereign.
He turned back toward the palace. As he did so, a couple of other men in nondescript rock-gray cloaks who had also been walking through King Swemmel Square turned in the same direction. Not enough other people were abroad in the square to let them disguise their movements, try as they would.
Rathar laughed. The wind tore apart the puff of vapor that burst from his mouth. He’d been a fool to imagine he could stay anonymous even for a few minutes.
Inside the palace, he took off the cloak at once, draping it over his arm. As if to make up for the savage weather outside, Unkerlanters commonly heated their dwellings and workplaces beyond the comfortable.
Major Merovec saluted him when he came into the office. “My lord Marshal, a gentleman from the foreign ministry has been waiting to see you,” his adjutant said. As usual, Merovec’s voice and face revealed little.
“And what does he want?” Rathar asked.
“Sir, he says he will discuss that only with you.” Merovec wasn’t shy about letting the marshal know what he thought of that: it infuriated him.
“Then I’d better see him, hadn’t I?” Rathar said mildly.
“I will get him, sir,” Merovec said. “I did not wish to leave him alone in your private office.” He’d probably found a broom closet for the foreign ministry official instead, if the gleam in his eye was any sign. That gleam still there, he hurried away.
When he returned, sure enough, he had an angry official with him. “Marshal, this man of yours has not granted me the deference due the deputy foreign minister of Unkerlant,” the fellow snapped.
“My lord Ibert, I am sure he only sought to keep secrets from spreading,” Rathar replied. “My aides can sometimes be more zealous on my behalf than I would be were I here in person.”
Ibert kept on glaring at Merovec, who might have been carved from stone. The deputy foreign minister muttered under his breath, but then said, “Very well, my lord Marshal, I will let it go—this time. Now that you are here in person, shall we closet ourselves together to keep secrets from spreading?” He kept an eye on Merovec: he wanted his own back.
And Rathar could not refuse him. “As you wish, my lord,” he said. “If you will do me the honor of accompanying me …” He led Ibert into his private office, closing the door behind them. The last he saw of the outside world was Merovec’s face. He knew he would have to make things right with his adjutant, but that could wait. He nodded to the deputy foreign minister. “And for what reason have we closeted ourselves together here?”
Ibert pointed to the map behind Rathar’s desk. “My lord Marshal, when we go to war against Algarve come spring, are we prepared to defend ourselves against a Zuwayzi attack from the north?”
Rathar turned to the map himself. Pins with colored heads showed concentrations of Unkerlanter soldiers and, somewhat less certainly, those of Algarve and Yanina. Almost all the gold-headed pins that represented Unkerlant’s war-ready forces were near the kingdom’s eastern border. The marshal clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Not so well as we might be, my lord,” he answered. “If we are to beat the redheads, I have no doubt we shall need every man we can scrape up.” He looked back to Ibert. “You are telling me we should prepare for such a misfortune, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Ibert said flatly. “Our spies and his Majesty’s minister in Bishah report there can be no doubt that Zuwayza and Algarve are conspiring against us.”
Sighing, Rathar tried to seem more surprised than he was. “That is too bad,” he said, and marveled at how large an understatement he could pack into four short words. Another of King Swemmel’s pigeons had come home to roost—and had shit on the windowsill as it flew in. Had Rathar been wearing King Shazli’s shoes (all Shazli was in the habit of wearing), he would have thought about avenging himself on Unkerlant, too.
“What do you propose to do about this?” Ibert demanded, sounding almost as petulant as his sovereign.
However petulant he sounded, it was the right question. Rathar said, “Since you assure me we do need to ready ourselves to meet this danger, I shall consult with my officers and develop a plan to do so. My immediate response”—he glanced at the map again—“is not to worry a great deal.”
“How not?” Ibert said. “The Zuwayzin were a thorn in our side during our last fight against them. Why should they prove any different now?”
Patiently, Rathar answered, “During the last war, they fought on the defensive. The going is usually harder when one attacks. And, even if the black men should win some early successes—if you will pardon my blunt-ness, my lord, so what?”
Ibert’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. ‘“So what,’ my lord Marshal? Is that all you care for the soil of Unkerlant, that you would let the naked savages of the north seize it for their own?”
“Seizing it is one thing,” Rathar answered. “Keeping it is another. With the worst will in the world toward us, the Zuwayzin cannot go far beyond the borders they had before we forced them back a year ago. They have not the men, the behemoths, or the dragons to do more.”
“That would be quite bad enough,” Ibert said.
“Would it?” Rathar asked. “If we weaken the force with which we fight Algarve, we shall surely regret it, because it will mean we are less likely to beat the redheads. Once we have beaten the Algarvians, though, how can Zuwayza hope to stand alone against us?”
He studied Ibert. The man had held his post for some time, no mean achievement under King Swemmel. The easiest way to do so, though, was to do nothing but mirror the king’s thoughts and desires. Rathar waited to discover whether the deputy foreign minister had any thoughts of his own.
Ibert licked his lips. “Suppose you take no troops from the Algarvians, and they and the Zuwayzin defeat us anyhow?”
That was a very good question. Rathar wished Swemmel would ask such questions from time to time. So Ibert did have wits of his own: something worth knowing. The marshal said, “If that should happen—which the powers above prevent—it will be the redheads who beat us, not the black men. I would not wish to move soldiers away from the stronger foe to ward myself against the weaker.”
“That strikes me as a reasonable reply, my lord Marshal,” Ibert said. “I shall bear your words to his Majesty.”
And if Swemmel threw a tantrum and ordered an all-out assault on Zuwayza instead of the attack on Algarve … Rathar would obey him, and would obey him with a small sigh of relief. He did not relish the prospect of assailing King Mezentio’s men. He would have obeyed an order to attack Zuwayza with a large sigh of relief rather than a small one had he not begun to worry that the Algarvians were also contemplating an attack on Unkerlant.
But when he mentioned that to Ibert, the deputy foreign minister shook his head. “We’ve seen little evidence of it, aside from the attempted seduction of Zuwayza. Our ministries otherwise report unusually cordial relations with the redheads, in fact.”
“We are not the only ones moving soldiers toward our common border,” Rathar insisted.
“Neither the foreign ministry nor the king views these movements with alarm,” Ibert said. “His Majesty is confident we shall enjoy the advantages of surprise when the blow falls in the east.”