by Shannon West
“Where’s the man with black hair?” Larz asked haltingly. “He never came back.”
Kelan glanced over at him and lifted one eyebrow. “Well, look at you. I’m impressed, boy. Herkon isn’t an easy language for anybody, even if you did pronounce most of it wrong. But to answer your question, the man with black hair, whose name is Rasc Centarlo, has indeed not been back here. I’m sure the prince is keeping him busy.”
“What prince? Not Janos.”
“No, Janos is the king. I’m talking about his younger brother, Prince Tibiel. Rasc Centarlo works for Tibiel as his aide. Do you know that word? Aide? It means someone who helps the prince with his affairs.”
“Prince is the one with yellow hair all twisted? Like the king?”
“Twisted? Oh, you mean the braids. Yes, exactly.”
Kelan puffed on his pipe for a few minutes in silence and then turned back to Larz. “You know, boy, I was thinking. The king didn’t want you for his bed slave, and that’s a good thing, because of you being so young and all. It proves our king is a good man. A moral man. But Rasc didn’t say I couldn’t use you in some other way. It seems a waste for you to sit in here all day and do nothing when you could be working to earn your keep.”
“I like work—what kind work?”
“I’m not sure yet. I was thinking of maybe the army.”
“The army?” Larz put down his food and stared at Kelan. Had he understood him correctly? “Army?”
“Yes. I’m not sure how Rasc and the prince would react to that, and I suppose you technically still belong to the prince, since the king rejected you as a gift. But we’ve trained other slaves as soldiers before, when they’ve been suitable. Why not you? You have the bulk for it and while I haven’t seen you fight, something tells me that as a Tygerian, you’ll have learned a thing or two about the subject.”
Larz sat up straighter and patted his chest. “I’m an excellent warrior.”
“Mm. Considering your size, you’d be a real force against the Athelonians and it looks as if we’ll soon be at war with them again. With proper training and supervision, it could work. Well, let me talk to Rasc about it. I’ll send for him later. In the meantime, you can help me clean up around here. Come on boy,” he said as he lumbered to his feet. “This room needs a good sweeping. I’ll find you a broom and you can get started. If you start training as a soldier, you’ll be working hard every day.”
Chapter Five
The life of a soldier was one that Larz had always wanted for himself. Or at least ever since he’d seen his brother, Mikos, standing at a high dais beside their father when the Great War was finally over, wearing his medals and waving at the thousands of people below as they cheered both their names. He decided then and there that he would try his best to follow in his father’s and his brother’s footsteps. Becoming a soldier—even on this strange new planet, seemed like a relief. At least part of his plan for his life might be coming true.
Over the next three years, Larz was happy to finally be doing the thing he loved the most—training for battle and living in an actual Army camp. It wasn’t ideal—it wasn’t his own Tygerian army, but he told himself the training he’d receive would be invaluable, and he could bring it with him when he finally returned home as what he liked to think of as a seasoned veteran.
Best of all, he was learning things about being a soldier. Things like Laltanan battle formations. They were totally unlike anything the Tygerian armies used, and he clung to the hope that one day he’d have the chance to take the knowledge of them home to tell his father.
The training, which went on every day, so they could be ready to march out whenever they needed to face the Athelonians, required them to camp in the surrounding forests. They had to do a great deal of marching in the fields around the town and sparring and target practice as well. Like Tygeria and many other planets, in any conflict against their own planet’s inhabitants, the soldiers never used modern weapons, not even guns and disruptors, for fear of an escalation that might eventually destroy the planet. Hundreds of years before, they had come close to doing just that, so now modern weapons were banned on the planet by treaties. Treaties that were absolutely sacrosanct.
Only spears, swords, arrows and knives were allowed on the battlefield and if disrupters or firearms of any kind were brought in, the culprits would be summarily court-martialed and escorted to prison. Perpetrators would be lucky if they weren’t executed on the spot. Honor was a highly prized commodity on Laltana, so if anyone used modern weapons, everyone would consider them “nicurat,” which as best as Larz could tell, meant something like a cross between cowardly and unclean. It was one of the worst insults a person could give on the planet.
As one season faded into another, Larz slowly had become one of the best soldiers in his company, so good, in fact, that he was recruited for the King’s personal guard. He rarely got a chance to see Kelan anymore, except for the injections of a drug Kelan gave him each quarter to prevent him from shifting, a drug perfected by the Lycans during the war and used on Tygerian prisoners. He’d tried to tell Kelan he wouldn’t shift, because what would be the point? He had no way off the planet, and if he shifted, he’d have been killed right away. He didn’t have any kind of death wish. Kelan only smiled and patted his shoulder.
He knew Kelan still watched him from time to time when his company trained in the palace courtyards, and the older man even seemed to take a bit of pride in Larz’s accomplishments. What surprised him most, though, was the king. Larz had seen him on his balcony more than once, looking down at the training of his personal guard below. And every time he looked up at him, he’d found the king staring back down directly at him.
It was unnerving, but he was still technically under Kelan’s direction, since he was still a slave—his situation hadn’t changed at all in that regard, though his captains would no doubt have disagreed with that assessment. But now Larz went for long periods of time when he didn’t think so much about his status. And at night, after a hard day’s training in the hot Laltanan sun, he was far too tired to lie awake and worry about when he might see his family again, or if he ever would. What disturbed his rest even more, however, were his dreams of the king, and the one glimpse he’d had of Janos’s naked body under that white robe. During the daylight hours it was easier to put thoughts of him out of his mind, but Larz was a young, healthy male, and his nighttime thoughts continued to dwell primarily on Janos.
The days were better and filled with his training and his new friends. The other slaves in his company wore iron collars on their necks and iron cuffs on their wrists, unlike Larz’s gold ones, but like Larz, they thought being a soldier on Herkos was preferable by far to being a house or a bed slave. Actually, the Monilian didn’t speak at all, as was the norm for his species, but the human never seemed to shut up. Larz enjoyed the human’s chatter and his slang because it reminded him of Blake. The man’s name was Lucas Dimitri, or Luc for short, he’d told Larz with a grin, and he had been involved in a robbery on Earth. A man had accidentally been killed, he’d said, when he was a teenager in one of the gangs that roamed the big cities since the end of the war. His friends had been robbing something called a liquor store.
He said it was where humans bought their “booze,” whatever that was, and it hadn’t even been him who’d shot the man, but one of the boys with him. He was still angry and felt bad about it, telling Larz he’d told the “stupid bastards” with him not to bring any guns or weapons of any kind. The victim had been an innocent bystander and Luc had been sentenced as an accessory, but some of the others had been executed. Luc had been lucky, because many of the larger cities on Earth were now under martial law and criminal activity was severely punished.
Luc had been given life imprisonment on the prison moon, but after only a few years, his contract had been purchased by the Farlians. He had been destined then to be a love slave, like Larz had been, because he was young and good-looking. However, the Farlians soon deemed him �
�unsuitable,” because he liked to fight too much. Luc eventually was sold to Herkos to serve out the rest of his life as a soldier. They both still considered themselves to have had a lucky escape, as neither one of them, they agreed, was love slave material.
From time to time over the next three years, there were minor skirmishes with Athelon and both Larz and Luc were given the chance to hone their skills as soldiers. The Athelonians conducted border raids again and again against the farmers and settlers there on Herkos’s western border, and the king would dispatch his soldiers each time to drive them back across the border. It was a dance that Larz found that he enjoyed, as usually not much blood was shed on either side. It seemed to Larz that the Athelonians just liked to fight. It was a concept he understood.
His dreams about the king at night continued, however, no matter how busy and interesting his days were. The king sometimes traveled with his troops, and on these occasions, and Larz had come to appreciate his bravery and skill in maneuvers. He never failed to notice what a handsome man this King Janos was, even if his personality was lacking, so far as Larz was concerned. He ignored Larz as much as he could and never engaged him in conversation. Yet he felt his eyes on him often. With everyone else besides Larz, though, he seemed perfectly agreeable and even smiled at his officers and some of the men.
Kelan had told him the story of how the king had been captured and imprisoned during the war. Larz could understand why the king would be bitter—and he had to admit that his own treatment, once he arrived in Janos’s kingdom, had so far been very good.
Janos was popular with his troops, so that far from sharing Larz’s opinion of his personality, the other soldiers loved their king, and spoke often of his kindness and of how well-loved he was by the Herkon people. Larz figured it was mainly because he spent time with his men, often walking through the camp at night and stopping by each campfire to have a word or two with them, asking after their families or perhaps taking part in a quick game of chance. He always saw to it that the men had plenty to eat and provided good medical care for them too.
Larz tried to stay out of his way whenever he walked through the camp, knowing how the king felt about Tygerians and about him in particular. Luckily the king was always accompanied by his aides, so there was usually quite a stir in the camp as the entourage came through, and that gave Larz a chance to make himself scarce. Still, he was pretty to look at, and Larz found himself looking for him often during the raids, checking his position in any skirmish and making sure it wasn’t being overrun.
So far it had been easy enough, though, for Larz to keep himself from the king’s notice. That is, until one day, three years after he’d been kidnapped, that it seemed to him fate finally intervened and brought them face to face again.
Chapter Six
The king’s guard had left the palace grounds early one morning to travel to the west. Yet another raiding party had come across the border, and this time they had burned down a settler’s home, stolen his livestock, and killed him and his family when they tried to fight back. This was the most violent act to date and marked a real escalation in tensions. Larz heard through the grapevine that the king had sent a formal warning to the Athelonians and asked not only for reparations, but for the leaders of the raid to be turned over for execution. An all-out war was creeping closer and closer, and there was a great deal of speculation going on as they marched toward the border.
Larz and Luc had been walking near the front of the line when the all-terrain vehicle carrying the king had passed close by them, heading west. The vehicles, which the Herkons called LVs, or land vehicles, were used by the officers as transport and for surveillance of the terrain ahead of the foot soldiers.
King Janos had been sitting in the front of the open LV as it passed, next to the driver, with one booted foot propped on the open-door frame next to the dash. He was dressed all in black, his long, dark hair pulled back and tied in braids, and a cap pulled down low on his head, but there was no mistaking who it was. The vehicle passed close enough by so that when the king turned to look over at them, Larz saw the flash of recognition on his face as their eyes met. He could have sworn the king’s cheeks flushed a quick, hot pink before he turned his head quickly away and stared stonily ahead.
Beside him, Luc sighed. “How do kings come to look like that anyway? Kings should all be old, ugly and fat.”
Larz, whose own beloved father was a handsome king, turned to his friend with a smile. “Why do you say that?”
“Because there should be some justice in the universe! I mean, it’s hardly fair, is it? They get to have power and prestige and live in a palace and get to look like that too? God should have spread the wealth around at least a little.”
“Our gods favor our kings because they’re the best we have to offer. Or at least the Tygerian kings are. That one,” he said, nodding after the LV, “that one looks nice, but he’s not.” Larz kept his voice down low so he wouldn’t be overheard. “I met him once, you know.”
“Who, King Janos? When?”
“When I was first brought to this planet. I was purchased to be his bed slave.”
Luc turned a shocked face toward Larz. “Fuck me!”
Larz shrugged, ignoring the strange epithet. He was used to humans and their odd expressions. “That’s what Kelan told me, anyway. But he took one look at me and started saying awful things about me and my people. He said that he’d sooner lie with an animal than with a Tygerian. He said all Tygerians smelled bad and I don’t know…a lot of other insulting things…I forget all of them now. Then he had me taken away, sent me back to the slave master.”
“Ouch. I see what you mean, but then again, King Janos would think that way, wouldn’t he? After what he went through?”
“What do you mean? What did he go through?”
“King Janos was in Beatik—the infamous prisoner of war camp on your planet. Almost four years, I heard. It’s a wonder he even survived. That place would make the prison I was in on Ganymede look like a vacation resort.”
“Oh yes, I heard that he was a prisoner, but not where. Beatik was an awful place.”
“Well, he’s been home for the past six or seven years, I think. He was captured just a couple of years before the end of the war—he was just a teenager then—and then held two years past the end of the war because of his royal status. And the fact he refused to sign the peace treaty didn’t help him any either.”
Larz knew about Beatik, the infamous Tygerian prisoner of war camp. If Janos had been held in there for over four years, Larz could understand his hatred for Tygerians a little better. Not long before he’d left for training, his father had discovered the real abuses that had taken place in the prison quite by accident. It had all come about because of a human mother’s request to Blake, as the king’s consort, to have her son’s remains returned to his home on Earth for a proper burial. He had died at Beatik, but when Blake and Larz’s brother-in-law Ryan led a delegation to the prison to locate his grave, they had found there were no individual graves—only large communal pits the soldiers’ bodies had been dumped into.
His omak had been appalled and sickened by it and by the conditions in the prison, and he had refused to budge or come back to the palace until King Davos himself had traveled to the prison on the outskirts of the capital city to thoroughly inspect the place and its administration. They’d found years of abuse toward prisoners dating all the way back to Davos’s uncle, who had been king before him. Records had been falsified so that food and supplies intended for the prisoners had been siphoned off and sold to black market suppliers, while the prisoners had often been left to starve. There were also dungeons and instruments of torture in some of the rooms that Blake had ranted about, calling them “mid-evil,” or something like that. Which had to be bad, because his fathers had a huge fight about it, with Blake questioning how Davos hadn’t known.
Davos had been livid and sworn he hadn’t known, because he’d been busy with running the war an
d had left the administration of the prison to a decorated general he thought he could trust. Davos had summarily executed that man and his staff when he finished his inspection, and the prison, which was in a deplorable condition, had been torn down. The bodies of hundreds of long dead prisoners had been exhumed and DNA tested against records of those captured over the years. It had been a monumental undertaking and it still wasn’t finished. Or it hadn’t been when he’d left. It had been a terrible scandal on Tygeria for an entire cycle, and Larz began to understand why Janos hated the Tygerians so much.
“How old is he, do you think?” Larz kicked a pebble lying in his path with a little more force than was absolutely necessary. “He said I was a child, and he didn’t fuck children.”
“King Janos? I think he must be in his mid to late twenties. Maybe twenty-eight or so.”
“He’s not much older than me.”
Luc glanced over at him in surprise. “I thought you were older.”
“I was almost sixteen when I was kidnapped away from my home. Three cycles ago, now.”
“Did the king know you’d been kidnapped?”
“I assume so.”
“He kidnapped you himself?” Luc asked in an incredulous voice.
“No, Farlian slavers did that. But his brother, Prince Tibiel sent a buyer for me, according to what Kelan told me.”
“Huh. I guess they messed him up more in that prison than most people thought then. He’s seriously never tried to send you back home? Even knowing you’d been kidnapped?”
“No. I’m still here, aren’t I? But to be fair, I’m not sure he knows. Kelan said his brother probably didn’t tell the king.”
“Damn. Well, maybe you should tell him?”
“I don’t think it would make much difference. Not considering the way he feels about the Tygerians.”
“I’m sorry, Bastion. I had no idea about your situation or that you were so young.”